TREE HEIGHT ESTIMATION IN TROPICAL RAIN FOREST LANDSCAPE USING IfSAR DATA

摘要

Tree height is one of essential components in study of forest biomass. Practically, tree height has been direct calculated based on established allometric equation after regular census of diameter of breast height (DBH). However, DBH measurements in high density of primary tropical rainforest is time consuming and laborious. Indeed, over high density vegetated area such as in primary tropical rainforest, advances technology is necessary in order to support the limitation of the sustainability process. Thus, this study shows the use of airbone terrestrial elevation model from IfSAR sensor to derive the tree height in oldest and high density tropical rain forest reserve at nearly center of Peninsular Malaysia named as Pasoh Forest Reserve (PFR). Analysis from random of tree height samples derived from IfSAR gives a good confidence accuracy (RMSE = 1.64) and highly correlated (r~2 = 0.6) compare with biometric tree height (calculated using established biometric equation).