Analyses and trends of forest biomass in higher Northern Latitudes

Information on forest volume, forest coverage and biomass are important for developing global perspectives about CO$_{2}$ concentration changes. Forest biomass cannot be directly measured from space yet, but remotely sensed greenness can be used to estimate biomass on decadal and longer time scales in regions of distinct seasonality, as in the north. Hence, in this research, numerical methods were used to estimate forest biomass in higher northern regions. A regression model linking Normalized Difference Vegetation Index(NDVI), to forest biomass extracted from SPOT/4 VEGETATION data and PAL 8km data in regional and continental area (N40-N70) respectively. Statistical tests indicated that the regression model can be used to represent the changes of forest biomass carbon pools and sinks at high latitude regions over years 1982-2000. This study suggests that the implementation of estimation of biomass based on 8-km resolution NOAA/AVHRR PAL and SPOT-4/VEGETATION data could be detected over a range of land cover change processes of interest for global biomass change studies.