As the most fundamental element of forest ecosystems, forest trees provide habitat and resources for other forest species. Tree species diversity and standing dead trees are important indicators of forest ecosystem health and stability. Detailed information on spatial patterns of standing dead trees and tree species diversity is essential for forest biodiversity assessment, forest disturbance monitoring, and the management and conservation of forest resources. As such, the main focus of this thesis is on the development of workflows to map standing dead trees and to obtain maps of tree species diversity. To achieve this, state-of-the-art methods from statistics and machine learning were applied to multiple spaceborne remote sensing imagery.
