Estimation of Forest Biomass Using Multivariate Relevance Vector Regression

The objective of this study is to develop a method based on multivariate relevance vector regression (mvrvr) as a kernel-based Bayesian model for the estimation of above-ground biomass (agb) in the Hyrcanian forests of Iran. Field AGB data from the Hyrcanian forests and multi-temporal PALSAR backscatter values are used for training and testing the methods. The results of the MVRVR method are then compared with other methods: multivariate linear regression (MLR), multilayer perceptron neural network (mlpnn), and support vector regression (svr). The MLR model showed lower values of R2 than the three other approaches. Although the SVR model was found to be more accurate than MLPNN, it had the lowest saturation point of 224.75 Mg/ha. The use of MVRVR model significantly improves the estimation of AGB (R2 = 0.90; RMSE = 32.05 Mg/ha), and the model showed a superior performance in estimating AGB with the highest saturation point (297.81 Mg/ha).