Training Manual for the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Technical Protocol for Forest Monitoring

This guidance document provides information on utilizing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data to monitor forests. The training manual begins with a brief background of the Forest-PLUS project, which is a partnership between USAID/India and the Government of India that seeks to develop better tools, techniques, and methods for forest ecosystem management. The manual also includes the concept of the training materials that include theory and hands-on work on SAR data for end-to-end processing of data.

Objectives of the training are: to build capacity of SFD technical staff to pre-process the microwave remote sensing (SAR) data for the generation of backscatter images using open source software and to build proficiency of SFD technical staff in converting backscatter data to biomass maps at the landscape level with the help of field sampled locations using open source software.

The document includes information on how to acquire SAR data, software requirements, SAR data pre-processing, and protocol models.