Remote Sensing and Mapping of Fine Woody Carbon With Satellite Imagery and Super Learner

Deadwood is a critical component of forest ecosystems, storing nutrients for plants and serving as a carbon store and emission source. Climate change influences forest ecosystem dynamics with the potential for deadwood to emit carbon more rapidly due to accelerated decay and increased wildfires and increased inputs via mass forest mortality and disturbance events. To objectively inform our understanding of wildfires and associated carbon emissions, this study estimates the carbon content of dead fine woody debris (FWD) using multimodal data, such as Landsat-8 multispectral imagery, Sentinel-1 (C-band) and PALSAR (L-band) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, and terrain features to estimate the FWD of less than 0.25 in (1 h), 0.25–1 in (10 h), and 1–3 in (100 h). This data fusion provides spectral information to assess vegetation health that correlates with deadwood, as well as penetrability from SAR, resulting in structural information and biomass sensitivity. An ensemble machine learning (ML) model was trained using measurements from the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Database. A feature importance analysis was also performed to investigate the importance of input features to the model’s performance. A super learner regression (SLR) model composed of 9 base learners, including an ElasticNet model as meta-learner, was proposed and achieved the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$R^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> values of 0.75, 0.72, and 0.62 to estimate 1-, 10-, and 100-h FWD, respectively. The validated model was then used to estimate deadwood carbon in the 2021 Dixie Fire region of California, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach, emphasizing the value of multimodal data for real-time FWD carbon stock estimation.