Construction and Protection of Forest Resources
Qiongfen YU, Cairong YUE, Hongbin LUO, Guangfei LUO, Yunfang DUAN, Miaoqi SUN, Chengzhi NEHG, Tianshu XU
In order to explore the potential of L-band full-polarization SAR data to estimate forest aboveground biomass (AGB), five polarimetric scattering ratio parameters (R1, R2, R3, R4, R5) were constructed based on the canopy-ground scattering component of Unmmaned Aero Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) data of the AfricaSAR project. Calculating the Radar Vegetation Index (RVI), and 21 polarimetric decomposition parameters were extracted by four model-based decompositions, including six-component and seven-component decomposition. Finally, all features were merged and the random forest feature importance was used to screen out the optimal feature combination, and random forest (RF), support vector machine regression (SVR), K-nearest neighbor regression (KNN) were used to estimate forest AGB of Lope, The Gaboneses Repbulic, Africa, with different feature combinations. The results showed that the polarimetric scattering ratio parameters, bulk scattering (Vol) and RVI had high sensitivity to forest AGB, and the correlation between R2 and AGB was 0.823, and the optimal feature combination was Vol, polarimetric scattering ratio parameters and RVI. Machine learning models with different feature combinations had shown good performance, the coefficient of determination (R2) of the machine learning model based on the polarimetric decomposition parameters was bigger than 0.800, and the root mean square error (RMSE) was less than 88.000 Mg/hm2, and the best effect was the RF model based on the optimal feature combination, which increased R2 by 0.144 and decreased RMSE by 30.327 Mg/hm2 compared with the polarimetric decomposition parameters alone. The polarimetric scattering ratio parameter had certain potential in the estimation of forest AGB, the introduction of RVI improved the accuracy of the model, the model-based decomposition was suitable for forest AGB estimation, and the machine learning model based on feature screening can better invert forest AGB, and there was no obvious saturation point when the AGB reached 400 Mg/hm2.