Geoinformatik / GIS

Monitoring of landscape changes

Keeping track of changes is essential for the long-term evaluation of sites and regions. Only if natural resources are not overexploited, the environmental integrity and human security are granted in a sustainable way. SAR data is archived since the early 90es and can be used for multi-temporal analyses of changes in land-use or landcover or for the monitoring of specific target classes.

The image on the right shows how SAR data can be used for the large-scale mapping of resources. It was created with a mosaic from ALOS PALSAR scenes to estimate the distribution of above-ground biomass (ABM) in the border region of Chad and sudan. As a result of the Darfur chrisis, many refugee camps established behind the Chad border.

Due to its wavelength of 26 cm, ALOS PALSAR is especially sensitive to vegetation. As backscatter intensity increases with growing stock volume, stable relationships have been found and used for the regionalization of AGB values over hundreds of kilometers.

Furthermore, our work features