Towards operational forest monitoring using satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar

This paper describes, and illustrates using documented applications, a general framework methodology for wide-area forest and land use mapping and change detection using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing. Consideration is given to implementation of the SAR-based methodology using both commercial and free/open-source software. Our experience shows that constructing a complete processing chain requires either a variety of expensive commercial software packages, or recourse to considerable bespoke software development, and in either case yields a fragmented solution not readily accessible to non-experts. It is argued that this poses a barrier to the uptake of satellite SAR by tropical forest countries, preventing them from exploiting a reliable and predictable source of remote sensing data suited to forest monitoring. Construction of a free software tool for use with SAR and other remotely sensed data is considered and it is argued that a single tool encompassing the complete framework methodology is both feasible and desirable.