Evaluation and Comparison of ICESat-2 and GEDI Data for Terrain and Canopy Height Retrievals in Short-Stature Vegetation

Two space-borne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) missions, Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) and Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), have demonstrated high capabilities in extracting terrain and canopy heights in forest environments. However, there have been limited studies evaluating their performance for terrain and canopy height retrievals in short-stature vegetation. This study utilizes airborne LiDAR data to validate and compare the accuracies of terrain and canopy height retrievals for short-stature vegetation using the latest versions of ICESat-2 (Version 5) and GEDI (Version 2). Furthermore, this study also analyzes the influence of various factors, such as vegetation type, terrain slope, canopy height, and canopy cover, on terrain and canopy height retrievals. The results indicate that ICESat-2 (bias = −0.05 m, RMSE = 0.67 m) outperforms GEDI (bias = 0.39 m, RMSE = 1.40 m) in terrain height extraction, with similar results observed for canopy height retrievals from both missions. Additionally, the findings reveal significant differences in terrain and canopy height retrieval accuracies between ICESat-2 and GEDI data under different data acquisition scenarios. Error analysis results demonstrate that terrain slope plays a pivotal role in influencing the accuracy of terrain height extraction for both missions, particularly for GEDI data, where the terrain height accuracy decreases significantly with increasing terrain slope. However, canopy height has the most substantial impact on the estimation accuracies of GEDI and ICESat-2 canopy heights. Overall, these findings confirm the strong potential of ICESat-2 data for terrain and canopy height retrievals in short-stature vegetation areas, and also provide valuable insights for future applications of space-borne LiDAR data in short-stature vegetation-dominated ecosystems.