Backscatter/FVC Space: A Method for Estimating Forest Growing Stock Volume Combining SAR and Optical Remote Sensing

The forest is an important part of carbon resources. Forest growing stock volume (GSV) is an important parameter of forest. The Water Cloud Model (WCM) is a simple equation that describes the interaction between ground objects and electromagnetic waves. It has also been applied in the estimation of forest GSV. When estimating GSV, the WCM equation parameters are usually calculated using least squares, but the least squares method relies on field reference data. The subsequent WCM development algorithm BIOMASAR uses a sliding window method that does not rely on measured data. However, the sliding window method is inefficient and can easily lead to missing pixels. We designed the backscatter/fractional vegetation coverage (FVC) feature space based on WCM and BIOMASAR to estimate forest GSV. Comparing with the national forest inventory (NFI) reference dataset and the BIOMASAR algorithm results in the study area, the method is evaluated from three aspects: accuracy, efficiency, and texture. The results show that this method does not rely on actual reference data, and the efficiency is increased from 1661s in the sliding window to 663s. The correlation with the NFI reference data is 0.45, the RMSE is 116.2327 m3/ha, and the RRMSE is 64.86%. The accuracy is better than the BIOMASAR sliding window GSV results in this study area, and compared with Google Earth images of the same period, it is also more consistent with the field texture. In short, the backscatter/FVC feature space can efficiently obtain forest GSV estimates more consistent with field conditions without relying on measured data.