The Kyoto & Carbon Initiative — A Brief Summary

The Kyoto & Carbon (K&C) Initiative is an international collaboration led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that revolves primarily around the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Arrayed L-band SAR (PALSAR). The Initiative builds on the experience gained from the Global Rain Forest Mapping (GRFM) and Global Boreal Forest Mapping (GBFM) projects [1], [2], in which SAR data from the Japanese Earth Resources Satellite (JERS-1) were used to generate consistent image mosaics over the entire tropical and boreal zones of Earth. While the GRFM and GBFM projects were undertaken already in the mid 1990s, they demonstrated the utility of L-band SAR data for mapping and monitoring forest and wetland areas and the importance of providing spatially and temporally consistent satellite acquisitions for regional-scale monitoring and surveillance.