Monitoring Change In Tropical Monsoonal Woodlands Using SAR

  A. K. Milne    Office of Postgraduate Studies and
   Centre for Remote Sensing and GIS
   University of New South Wales   2052
   Australia
   t.milne@unsw.edu.au

   Seasonally and intermittently inundated floodplains occur along most of
  the coastal draining rivers of Northern Australia.  Common to this
  monsoon-influenced coastal region is a dry season (April to November) and
  a wet season (December to March).

   In most of the river catchments streams drain from an upland escarpment
  towards the coast.  The ecosystems developed in these floodplain
  environments is complex, dynamic and resilient, often undergoing annual
  changes in water depth from being dry to being covered for 3-4 months by
  2-3 metres of water.  Vegetation communities present include forests,
  woodlands, shrublands, grasslands and extensive macrophytic floating and
  submerged herblands, all of which relate and respond to the hydrologic
  regimes of either permanent or seasonal inundations.

   This paper reports on the use of ERS-1 and ERS-2 data to monitor
  seasonal changes in the temporal and spatial pattern of inundation in the
  Alligator Rivers of the Northern Territory and on the progress to date of
  establishing routine procedures for mapping the distribution of wetlands
  vegetation patterns in Northern Australia.

   Keywords:  wetlands, radar, monitoring, flooding

Keywords: ESA European Space Agency - Agence spatiale europeenne, observation de la terre, earth observation, satellite remote sensing, teledetection, geophysique, altimetrie, radar, chimique atmospherique, geophysics, altimetry, radar, atmospheric chemistry