Indirect estimation of structural parameters in South African forests using MISR-HR and LiDAR remote sensing data

The authors acknowledge the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, Task 205 of the Southern African Science Service Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management, SASSCAL, project) which contributed to the funding of this study. The first author is funded through a Professional Development Grant provided by the National Research Foundation (NRF), South Africa. The Carnegie Airborne Observatory is supported by the Avatar Alliance Foundation, Margaret A. Cargill Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, W.M. Keck Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Mary Anne Nyburg Baker and G. Leonard Baker Jr., andWilliam R. Hearst III. The application of the CAO data in South Africa is made possible by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, and the endowment of the Carnegie Institution for Science. The MISR data were made available by NASA Atmospheric Science Data Center ASDC while the MISR-HR products were obtained from the Global Change Institute (GCI) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The authors acknowledge Frans van den Bergh of the Meraka Institute, CSIR, South Africa, who provided the script to reformat and re-project the MISR-HR products into a form compatible with the LiDAR data. The iSimangalisoWetland Park and AAM Group are both acknowledged for supplying the LiDAR subset data of the iSimangaliso Saint-Lucia.