ABSTRACT
Aboveground biomass (AGB) is an important proxy for productivity, carbon sequestration and carbon balance capacity in terrestrial ecosystems. Accurate estimation of AGB in terrestrial ecosystems is fundamental for quantifying carbon emissions and removals due to land use and climate change. Remote sensing is poised to advance the mapping of vegetation structure and quantify the stocks and changes of AGC in vegetation. Vegetation optical depth (VOD), retrieved from passive microwave satellite observations and related to the water content of vegetation mass, offers opportunities for monitoring the AGC dynamics due to its key features. The new VOD product, L-VOD, has been produced using low-frequency microwave observations from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite. The chapter calculates two goodness-of-fit metrics between pairs of reference benchmark map and AGC map: the coefficient of determination and the root-mean-squared error. Trend estimates were calculated using linear regression slope. Linear correlation coefficients were calculated to quantify the concurrent association between time series.
