Vertical canopy cover retrieval for greater Khingan forest based on a geometric-optical model using Landsat data

Forest vertical canopy cover (VCC) is an essential factor to be considered during forest resource inventory, sub-compartment division and thinning intensity. In order to monitor the forest canopy structure changes over the Greater Khingan, two temporal (2005 and 2010) forest VCC are derived by inverting the Li-Strahler geometric-optical model (GO) based on the extracted endmembers. The results show that the estimated VCC based on GO model agrees well with the measurements from the national forest inventory data with R 2005 2 =0.64, MSE 2005 =0.32%; R 2010 2 =0.74, MSE 2010 =0.25%.