In the recent annual calls from the Swedish National Space Board (Rymdstyrelsen), two proposals were funded where a member from the Section was the main applicant.
Johan Fransson received a grant for the research project ”Retrieval of forest biomass and biomass change with spaceborne SAR” which will run from 2015-16. The objective of the research project is to investigate and evaluate X-, C-, L- and P-band SAR data from the spaceborne systems TanDEM-X, Sentinel-1, ALOS PALSAR and ALOS-2 PALSAR-2, and airborne systems E-SAR and SETHI for primarily biomass and tree height estimations and their change over time, both in boreal and hemi-boreal forests.
Mats Nilsson received a grant for the applied project ”Deriving improved nation-wide raster databases using satellite images and airborne laser data” for 2015. In this project the main objective will be to develop and implement methods for updating the current ALS-based forest estimates by incorporating other data such as Landsat or SPOT images, and by testing different approaches.