Talk to be held at the workshop on image analysis and spatial statistics in forestry on November 2, 1999 at KVL, Frederiksberg, Denmark

An overview of forestry remote sensing activities at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Remote Sensing Laboratory in Umeå

Johan Fransson (Johan.Fransson@resgeom.slu.se)
Dept. of Forest Resource Management and Geomatics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå, Sweden.

The Remote sensing laboratory is a section of the Department of forest resource management and geomatics at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå. The section consists of 16 people working with research and teaching in remote sensing of forestry and geographical information systems. The research part covers a broad variety of activities in order to develop new methods of capturing forest data by combining remotely sensed data with field data. The researchers and doctoral students at the section analyse optical and radar data acquired from many different sensors deployed on satellite, aircraft, and helicopter platforms. This implies that estimation of forest parameters can be performed at different scales such as regional, stand, and tree level.

The Remote sensing laboratory is surrounded by a good research environment at the department with on going research and deep knowledge in forest survey, forest management planning, and forest biometrics. The Swedish National forest inventory is administrated and managed at the department providing remote sensing projects with high quality field data collected over all of Sweden on an annual basis.

The Remote sensing laboratory is also involved in projects co-operating with universities, authorities, forest companies, and forest associations in Sweden. Fruitful international collaboration is also carried out to the benefit of the forest society.

The presentation will give an overview of the following:

- Regional estimation of forest parameters using satellite and National forest inventory data (Mats.Nilsson@resgeom.slu.se, Heather.Reese@resgeom.slu.se)

- Raster prediction of forest parameters using geostatistical prediction methods (Jorgen.Wallerman@resgeom.slu.se)

- Long-term forest monitoring with satellite image time series (Steve.Joyce@resgeom.slu.se)

- Modelling occurrence of reindeer and key habitat features using satellite data (Per.Sandstrom@resgeom.slu.se)

- Estimation of forest parameters using CARABAS-II VHF SAR data (Johan.Fransson@resgeom.slu.se)

- Estimation of forest parameters using airborne laser scanning data (Johan.Holmgren@resgeom.slu.se)

- Combined estimates of forest parameters using optical and field data in neural nets (Olle.Hagner@resgeom.slu.se)