Abstract
Mangrove forests are playing a vital role by storing and sequestering a large amount of global carbon that helps to reduce the GHG emission. Unfortunately, the global mangrove forests are decreasing rapidly due to agricultural expansion, illegal logging, mining, and palm oil production. The UNFCCC initiates REDD+ initiatives for reducing the GHG emission from deforestation and forest degradation. The aboveground biomass and carbon stock estimation is a prerequisite for an MRV system for complying such initiative. The use of UAV and TLS are considered as a popular remote sensing technique for estimating aboveground biomass and carbon stock appropriately. This study is aimed at a comparative assessment on the applicability of UAV and TLS for estimating aboveground biomass and carbon stock in the mangrove forest. The tree height extracted from CHM of UAV images can provide comparatively accurate tree height. The DBH and tree height measured from TLS 3D point clouds can also give a correct measurement of DBH and tree height. The aboveground biomass was estimated using a specific allometric equation developed for mangrove forests. A total of 30 sample plots containing 893 trees were considered for conducting statistical analysis. The accuracy of DBH, tree height and aboveground biomass estimated from UAV and TLS were assessed for identifying if any significant difference between them or not. In this study, two segmentation algorithm including multi-resolution and SLIC were also evaluated for determining a better algorithm for tree crown segmentation on UAV imagery in mangrove forests. The result shows that tree height extracted from CHM of UAV imagery compared to tree height measured from TLS point clouds are attained at R2=0.82 (RMSE=1.44m). The multi-resolution and SLIC segmentation was conducted to evaluate these two segmentation algorithms. The accuracy of multiresolution segmentation was found 77.99% in 25cm resolution UAV-RGB image while SLIC provides 51.18% accuracy in 20cm UAV-RGB resampled image. A quadratic regression model is found best fitted for developing CPA-DBH relationship with R2=0.89 where RMSE=3.50cm. The model validation was found as R2=0.90 and RMSE=3.33cm. The accuracy of DBH predicted from CPA segmentation of UAV imagery compared to field-measured biometric DBH is attained at R2=0.87 (RMSE=3.21cm) while the accuracy of DBH measured from TLS point clouds is achieved at R2=0.99 (RMSE=0.30cm). On the other hand, the accuracy of AGB estimated form UAV compared to TLS is achieved at R2=0.93 while RMSE=3.78 ton/ha. Therefore, there is no significant difference found by t-test for DBH, tree height, and AGB estimated from field-measured biometric, TLS and UAV data. The study reveals that the measurement of UAV and TLS for estimating aboveground biomass and carbon stock is very close in the mangrove forest. The application of TLS is comparatively difficult in mangrove forests due to its challenging environment. Therefore, as a low-cost technology, UAV can be used to estimate aboveground biomass and carbon stock accurately especially in the mangrove forest. Consequently, as a remote sensing technique, UAV can be used broadly in any inaccessible area of mangrove forest for estimating aboveground biomass and carbon stock towards the implementation of MRV under REDD+ initiatives.