A HIGH-PRECISION EXPLICIT FOREST CARBON STOCK MODEL BASED ON REMOTE SENSING

Abstract. The current status as well as the potential absorption capability of the forest carbon sinks in terrestrial ecosystems are in urgent need of further studies. The ground observation-based methods are labor-intensive, and the resulting statistics from samples are difficult to evaluate, while inversion methods based on remote sensing data lack theoretical explanation and universality. This paper proposes a pixel-level, multi-scale, high-precision Explicit Forest carbon stock Model (EFM) that is universal and adaptive. First, four key variables were used in the construction of the EFM: remote sensing image resolution, forest canopy density, terrain slope, and forest height; Second, simulated forest scene were generated based on the growth characteristics of individual trees, and EFM parameters were solved and analyzed by these simulated pixels; Third, the EFM was tested at various scales and forest saturation levels to verify its accuracy, robustness, and applicability, the simulation and real-life experiments show that the correlation coefficient is greater than 0.98 and the relative error is about 20%. The EFM solves the problem that the existing methods are lack in theoretical interpretation and universal applicability, thus can be used to map forest carbon stocks at high resolution and large scale and even monitor forest carbon dynamics at global scale.