The BIOMASS Mission Algorithm & Analysis Platform (MAAP) and Related Open-Source Developments (BioPAL and GEOTREES)

 

Selected as European Space Agency’s seventh Earth Explorer in May 2013, the BIOMASS mission will provide crucial information about the state of our forests and how they are changing. This mission is being designed to provide, for the first time from space, P-band Synthetic Aperture Radar measurements to determine the amount of biomass and carbon stored in forests. The data will be used to further our knowledge of the role forests play in the carbon cycle.

In this context of an innovative sensor, the concept of Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform dedicated to the BIOMASS, to the NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) mission  and to the NASA Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission mission is proposed. Developed in a collaborative way between ESA and NASA, this Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform will implement, as part of the payload data ground segment, a virtual open and collaborative environment. The goal is to bring together data centre (Earth Observation and non- Earth Observation data), computing resources and hosted processing, collaborative tools (processing tools, data mining tools, user tools, …), concurrent design and test bench functions, accounting tools to manage resource utilisation, communication tools (social network) and documentation. This platform will give the opportunity, for the first time, to manage the community of users of the BIOMASS mission thanks to this innovative concept.

To best ensure that users can collaborate across the platform and to access needed resources, the MAAP requires all data, algorithms, and software to conform to open access and open-source policies. As an example of best collaborative and open-source practices, most of the BIOMASS Processing Suite (BPS) will be made openly available within the MAAP. This Processing Suite contains all elements to generate the BIOMASS upper-level data products and is currently in development under the umbrella of the open-source project called BioPAL. BioPAL is developed in a coherent manner, putting a modular architecture and reproducible software design in place. BioPAL aims to factorize the development and testing of common elements across different BIOMASS processors. The architecture of this scientific software makes lower-level bricks and functionalities available through a well-documented Application Programming Interface (API) to foster the reuse and continuous development of processing algorithms from the BIOMASS user community. This API will greatly simplify the use of the BIOMASS Processing Suite (BPS) on the MAAP.

In addition to open satellite data and open-source algorithms, open reference data is needed for Calibration and Validation. GEOTREES is composed of Biomass Reference Measurement sites that are in situ forest measurement sites with a common standard for high-quality data acquisition, transparent measurement protocols, long-term monitoring, and measurements traceable to SI units. GEO-TREES will be established through collaboration with existing international networks of high-quality forest plots that use standard forest monitoring protocols.