Towards Global Forest Biomass Estimators from Tree Height Data

Abstract

In order to estimate tree biomass, allometric equations take tree parameters such as tree height, wood density, circumference of trunk, and crown diameter as input parameters. Given that most of these quantities are challenging to be extracted from remote sensing data, we evaluate the option to approximate biomass by tree height only. We study our approach by evaluating linear regression, random forest, and Gaussian process regressor models when applied to the 2016 Jucker dataset. Results indicate that linear models fail to properly capture the relationship between biomass and tree height, but the Gaussian process regressor outperms the other two candidate models.