Analysis of forestry application potential of LuTan-1 mission: Preliminary assessment based on airborne experiment

LuTan-1 SAR mission is China's first L-band spaceborne SAR system which can provide single-pass polarimetric SAR interferometric (PolInSAR) data and multi-baseline PolInSAR data. One of the main purposes of the mission is forestry application such as forest mapping, change detection and parameters estimation. In this study, we focus on assessing the potential for LuTan-1 on forest AGB estimation based on multi-baseline air borne L-band data with field forest AGB plots. The results show that features extracted from the multi-baseline PolInSAR can achieve a relatively high estimation accuracy about 80%. In conclusion, LuTan-1 has promised potential for AGB mapping application of forestry.