Estimating biophysical variables of pasture cover using sentinel-1 data

Over the years, different optical remote sensing platforms and data have been used to estimate aboveground pasture biomass in a variety of landscapes, both heterogeneous and homogenous and at varying spatial scales. Optical methods are often confounded by target visibility, namely presence of cloud cover and haze, and are constrained to daylight conditions. In this study, we used the synthetic aperture radar data from the European Space Agency Sentinel-1 mission to estimate pasture biomass, sward height and leaf area index of a complex extensive grazing ‘farmscape’ comprising of a range of grass vegetation communities We observed that the quality of digital elevation model used in radar data pre-processing significantly influences the ability of eigenvector scattering decomposition in estimating biomass, sward height and leaf area index.