Relasphone - Mobile phone and interactive applications to collect ground reference biomass data for satellite image analysis

The availability of ground reference forest data can be a bottleneck in remote sensing studies. Data may be available in only limited areas because of the cost and lengthy process of traditional forest inventory data collection by professionals. In certain cases, forest inventory data may not be easy to obtain, if not impossible. We propose a new concept that reduces costs of forest inventory data collection compared to traditional methods and is more portable than ground lidar approaches. This participatory sensing approach relies on volunteers to collect forest inventory data. For collecting in-situ data from the forests, a forest measurement tool called Relasphone has been developed. Measured variables include stem biomass, tree species, tree height and age. The collected forest measurements can be combined with remote sensing data and put to a computation engine that produces forest biomass maps. The GPS-based location information embedded with measured forest data makes it possible to easily introduce measurements as a in-situ reference data into any GIS.