Operational deforestation detection for forest early warning systems (EWS) is a hot topic in Earth observation today. Due to the persistent cloud cover in tropical regions, active microwave is regarded as one promising technology for EWS. Despite significant progress in the last decade, a reliable, genuine deforestation EWS is still lacking, because the development of powerful algorithms demand a near perfect understanding of the forest backscatter nature. Building upon 9-years of ALOS-2 long-term pantropical forest observations with various breakthrough findings, we introduce the next-generation algorithm for L-band SAR deforestation detection which realize the first real EWS in the tropics with unmatched accuracy and speed.
The tremendous potential of ALOS-4/PALSAR-3 for further advancements in forest monitoring from local to global scales are discussed on the basis of the groundbreaking achievements made by its predecessor ALOS-2/PALSAR-2, the first long-term L-band SAR forest observation mission in history. The unprecedented seamless and frequent dual-polarization observation of the entire tropical forest belt between 2016 and 2022 has revolutionized the idea of global forest monitoring. In the upcoming ALOS-4 era, wide-area imaging with greatly improved spatial resolution and image quality at shorter revisit times will further boost the reliability for all kinds of forest remote sensing applications including forest classification, biomass estimation and deforestation detection.
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