Space-born spectrodirectional estimation of forest properties

With the upcoming global warming forests are under threat. To forecast climate change impacts and adaptations, there is need for developing improved forest monitoring services, which are able to record, quantify and map bio-indicators of the forests’ health status across the globe. In this context, Earth observation (EO) can provide a substantial amount of up-to-date information about the biochemical and structural conditions of our forests at a local-to-global scale. Among the optical EO instruments in space, one of the most innovative instruments is the experimental Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS) on board the PROBA-1 (Project for On Board Autonomy) satellite. CHRIS is capable of sampling reflected radiation at five viewing angles over the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) region of the solar spectrum with a relatively high spatial resolution (~17 m). The as such acquired spectrodirectional (combined multi-angular and spectroscopy) data may lead to new opportunities for space-based forest monitoring applications, yet the added value of canopy reflectance anisotropy measured over the whole VNIR spectral region is largely unknown. This is why the use of space-borne spectrodirectional data of a forested target has been investigated in this thesis.