Estimating vegetation indices and biophysical parameters for Central European temperate forests with Sentinel-1 SAR data and machine learning

Current vegetation indices and biophysical parameters derived from optical satellite data for forest monitoring are widely used in various applications but can be limited by atmospheric effects like clouds. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data can offer insightful and systematic forest monitoring with complete time series due to signal penetration through clouds and day and night image acquisitions. This study explores the use of SAR data, combined with ancillary data and machine learning (ML), to estimate forest parameters typically derived from optical satellites. It investigates whether SAR signals provide sufficient information for the accurate estimation of these parameters, focusing on two spectral vegetation indices (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index – NDVI and Enhanced Vegetation Index – EVI) and two biophysical parameters (Leaf Area Index – LAI and Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation – FAPAR) in healthy and disturbed temperate forests in Czechia and Central Europe in 2021. Vegetation metrics derived from Sentinel-2 multispectral data were used to evaluate the results. A paired multi-modal time-series dataset was created using Google Earth Engine (GEE), including temporally and spatially aligned Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, DEM-based features and meteorological variables, along with a forest type class. The inclusion of DEM-based auxiliary features and additional meteorological information improved the results. In the comparison of ML models, the traditional ML algorithms, Random Forest Regressor and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) slightly outperformed the Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML) approach, auto-sklearn, for all forest parameters, achieving high accuracies (R² between 70% and 86%) and low errors (0.055–0.29 of mean absolute error). XGB was the most computationally efficient. Moreover, SAR-based estimations over Central Europe achieved comparable results to those obtained in testing within Czechia, demonstrating their transferability for large-scale modeling. A key advantage of the SAR-based vegetation metrics is the ability to detect abrupt forest changes with sub-weekly temporal accuracy, providing up to 240 measurements per year at a 20 m resolution.