Canada has approximately 418 million hectares of forests, representing 10% of the forested land in the world. In order to monitor and report changes occurring in Canada's forest resources, in a transparent manner, we need effective and accurate measuring tools, one of which is remote sensing. Satellite remote sensing has been demonstrated to be a cost-effective method of examining large areas on the earth. Several of our studies [11, [2], and [3] have dealt with the extraction of forest attributes from satellite data. These studies have reported on our success with Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data. In this new research we have added the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) data from the EO-1 satellite to our multitemporal Landsat TM/ETM+ data sets. Analysis of the changes over time in forest cover, biomass, afforestation, reforestation and deforestation (ARD) are examined. A comparison is made of the results from ALI, TM, and ETM+ for the Hinton Alberta study area. This research has applicability to monitoring the compliance of other nations to international protocols, such as the Kyoto protocol.
