A novel system for monitoring grassland dynamics based on polarimetric SAR data

Inhalt:
Grasslands play a key role in the carbon and hydrological cycle. Accordingly, the analysis of their dynamics is of great importance in the light of the current intensification of agricultural land use. To this aim, in this paper we present a novel approach for monitoring grassland dynamics based on polarimetric high-resolution SAR imagery, which is capable of handling either dual- or quad-polarization multi-temporal data and supports targeted classification. Experimental results with dual-polarization TerraSAR-X data acquired over two different study areas for both 2011 and 2012 are extremely promising and assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach.