Discovering forest height changes based on spaceborne lidar data of ICESat-1 in 2005 and ICESat-2 in 2019:a case study in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region of China

摘要

Background:The assessment of change in forest ecosystems,especially the change of canopy heights,is essential for improving global carbon estimates and understanding effects of climate change.Spaceborne lidar systems provide a unique opportunity to monitor changes in the vertical structure of forests.NASA’s Ice,Cloud and Land Elevation Satellites,ICESat-1 for the period 2003 to 2009,and ICESat-2(available since 2018),have collected elevation data over the Earth’s surface with a time interval of 10 years.In this study,we tried to discover forest canopy changes by utilizing the global forest canopy height map of 2005(complete global coverage with 1 km resolution)derived from ICESat-1 data and the ATL08 land and vegetation products of 2019(sampling footprints with 17 m diameter)from ICESat-2.Results:Our study revealed a significant increase in forest canopy heights of China’s Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.Evaluations of unchanging areas for data consistency of two products show that the bias values decreased significantly from line-transect-level(−8.0 to 6.2 m)to site-level(−1.5 to 1.1 m),while RMSE values are still relatively high(6.1 to 15.2 m,10.2 to 12.0 m).Additionally,58%of ATL08 data are located in‘0m’pixels with an average height of 7.9 m,which are likely to reflect the ambitious tree planting programs in China.Conclusions:Our study shows that it is possible,with proper calibrations,to use ICESat-1 and-2 products to detect forest canopy height changes in a regional context.We expect that the approach presented in this study is potentially suitable to derive a fine-scale map of global forest change.