Forests for People

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images and through manual operation detected any possible

deforestation. This quick progress from data observation to infor-

mation dispatch was demonstrated in a successful collaboration

between JAXA, IBAMA, the Brazilian Federal Police and the Japan

International Cooperation Agency.

Unlike JERS-1, ALOS was able to achieve systematic acquisition

and high-level image processing over several years. Additionally,

ALOS became the workhorse for monitoring the global forest and

the related reductions of emissions from deforestation along with

the forest degradation REDD+ projects.

ALOS-2/PALSAR-2: addressing deforestation with a new satellite

ALOS operation was terminated on 12 May 2011, due to a power

failure. ALOS-2 is the successor of ALOS and will be launched in

August 2013. ALOS-2 is a SAR satellite and carries PALSAR-2, an

enhanced version of PALSAR. Its mission objectives involve both

forest and disaster monitoring. To suppress global warming, we will

conduct biomass measurements, deforestation watches and wetland

monitoring on a global scale. Decreasing forest carbon is an important

target and quantitative measurements and reducing deforestation are

the main goals. ALOS-2 houses the SAR antenna underneath the satel-

lite body, enabling both right- and left-side observations.

The main objectives using ALOS-2 are to observe the

global forest using FBD and to carry out quick deforesta-

tion monitoring using the dual-polarization ScanSAR in

Brazil, Indonesia and other locations.

A 14-year change map of the forest at Rondonia, Brazil

An artist’s view of ALOS-2

Source: ©JAXA

Red is used to show deforestation during the period (PALSAR-JERS-1 SAR), green the forested area as of 2010