Evaluation of RADARSAT-1 images acquired in fine mode for the study of boreal peatlands: a case study in James Bay, Canada

As part of a wider study of carbon cycling in boreal peatlands, radar remote sensing was used with the objective of obtaining diverse environmental information related to these peatland areas. This paper presents a case study of three peatlands located in the La Grande River watershed, Quebec, Canada. An analysis of multitemporal fine-mode RADARSAT-1 images was carried out, with the support of collected field data, to verify if hydrological conditions influence radar backscatter coefficients. Changes in hydrological conditions are reflected in the radar backscatter coefficient for areas having low and sparse trees. A maximum likelihood classification (MLC) on speckle-filtered images and textures was also carried out, evaluated, and compared with a similar classification procedure on standard-mode images. MLC using textures generated from multitemporal fine-mode images gave poorer results than a similar classification using multitemporal standard-mode textural images (35% versus 59% of overall accuracy using 10 classes and 37% versus 74% of overall accuracy using four classes).