リモートセンシング技術の森林植生分野での適用及び将来展望

抄録

Forests not only produce timber, but also offer us comfortable environment by cultivation of water source, filtration of air and water, prevention of flood and landslide and so forth. They contribute also to the conservation of forest genetics. These days, forests are given higher priority to their environmental resources than their timbers. For build-ing up a more efficient forest management plan, we have to have more detail information about the quantity and quality of forests at rather narrow intervals.
Romote sensing systems from space, such as the Landsat sensor system, can provide systematic, repetitive and global data of forest situations and environmental conditions of the earth's surface with adequate accuracy.
Remote sensing technology has been approved useful and effective for regional, national and global forest inventories by many application studies organized in Japan and othercountries.
The integration of remote sensing technology and geographic information system (GIS) is also considered to be very effective for monitoring forest areas and creating forest management plans. And using the GIS system, more complicated information, such as about environmental preservation functions of forest, is successfully obtained and analyzed.
This paper summarizes the present status of the art and makes some remarks on problems and future prospect of remote sensing for forestry.