Biomass images mangrove degradation in the Niger Delta

This Biomass image encompasses much of Nigeria’s Bayelsa region of the Niger Delta. To the northeast, we can see the major trunk of the Niger River before it branches off into the numerous distributaries that make up the vast Niger Delta. To the southeast, the Edumanom National Forest is home to Nigeria’s last remaining chimpanzee populations, and the last in the delta wetlands.

The image itself uses the nifty polarimetric function of the mission’s P-band radar instrument, which has a long wavelength that can pass through forest canopies and help us estimate the woody biomass of trunks and branches. The polarimetric function allows us to ascribe different colours, in an RGB scale, depending on the complexity of the scattering signal received by the satellite. This allows to visualise interesting features of the landscape.

The rivers appear almost black as hardly any signal is scattered back to the satellite. A clear boundary is visible between a region that is quite red in colour, mainly clustered to the top and right of the image, versus a more murky colour towards the middle and bottom. The latter is where there is a lot of standing water, in a very swampy region that features mangroves that are largely submerged.

What appear as black stains on the image are areas of deforestation or forest degradation. To the top of the image, amongst the reds, there is a high concentration of settlements where tracts of land have been deforested, while to the centre and bottom of the image, there appear to be areas of degraded mangroves.

Read more: Biomass images of the Niger Delta