Sagebrush, grasses, and forbs in a shrub-steppe ecosystem

Determining aboveground biomass of sagebrush, grasses, and forbs is important for estimating fuel loads, measuring carbon storage, and assessing habitat quality in shrublands. Remote sensing may offer a more efficient alternative to common, labor intensive methods of measuring aboveground biomass that are difficult to apply across large areas. Researchers from the USGS are studying how modeling aboveground biomass in large areas of shrub-steppe ecosystems usgin data from airborne lidar may be a more efficient way to estimate aboveground biomass.