Woody biomass maps of Mabalane, Gurue, and Maruppa, Mozambique

The data consist of woody biomass maps of three study areas - Mabalane, Gurue, and Maruppa in Mozambique. Each area map comprises three Geotiff layers stacked in the order band 1= 2007, band 2 = 2010, band 3 = 2014. Each pixel is an aboveground woody biomass in tonnes of carbon per hectare (ha). For the biomass maps -18.00000 means no data. Due to noise, it is possible to have negative biomass estimates. Individual layers can extracted for year specific analyses. Data were collected as part of the Abrupt Changes in Ecosystem Services and Wellbeing in Mozambican Woodlands (ACES) project under the ESPA programme Maps are built from three ALOS PALSAR scenes per year for 2007, 2010 and 2014. These are HV backscatter in power units (not dB). Late dry season images were acquired from two tracks. These are calibrated, terrain corrected and despeckeled (using a 3x3 GammaMAP filter) using SNAP version 2.0 and exported at 15 m pixel size. Each scene was then georeferenced to a mosaicked, pansharpened Landsat 8 image acquired from Sept 2014 using ENVI v 4.8. The georefenceing used manually selected reference tie points distributed around the image. Geo reference each scene before mosaicking. Coregistering doesn’t work- in SNAP with reasonable setting it seemed to make no difference. ALOS 2 is better located than ALOS 1. If you use this data you need to acknowledge JAXA and ESA, who supplied the images, as follows: JAXA kindly provided the ALOS PALSAR data through the 4th Research Agreement for the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (PI No. 1152). ESA also provided ALOS data via Category-1 Proposals 7493 and 18624. ESPA needs to be acknowledged separately.