Co-Kriging-Guided Interpolation for Mapping Forest Aboveground Biomass by Integrating Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation and Sentinel-2 Data

Mapping wall-to-wall forest aboveground biomass (AGB) at large scales is critical for understanding global climate change and the carbon cycle. In previous studies, a regression-based method was commonly used to map the spatially continuous distribution of forest AGB with the aid of optical images, which may suffer from the saturation effect. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) can collect forest vertical structure information with high precision on a global scale. In this study, we proposed a collaborative kriging (co-kriging) interpolation-based method for mapping spatially continuous forest AGB by integrating GEDI and Sentinel-2 data. First, by fusing spectral features from Sentinel-2 images with vertical structure features from GEDI, the optimal estimation model for footprint-level AGB was determined by comparing different machine-learning algorithms. Second, footprint-level predicted AGB was used as the main variable, with rh95 and B12 as covariates, to build a co-kriging guided interpolation model. Finally, the interpolation model was employed to map wall-to-wall forest AGB. The results showed the following: (1) For footprint-level AGB, CatBoost achieved the highest accuracy by fusing features from GEDI and Sentinel-2 data (R2 = 0.87, RMSE = 49.56 Mg/ha, rRMSE = 27.06%). (2) The mapping results based on the interpolation method exhibited relatively high accuracy and mitigated the saturation effect in areas with higher forest AGB (R2 = 0.69, RMSE = 81.56 Mg/ha, rRMSE = 40.98%, bias = −3.236 Mg/ha). The mapping result demonstrates that the proposed method based on interpolation combined with multi-source data can be a promising solution for monitoring spatially continuous forest AGB.