ICESat-2 for evaluating space-borne and national digital elevation models across forest and non-forest landscapes in Kastamonu, Turkiye

Abstract

Technological advancements have revolutionized the production of Global digital elevation models (DEMs). Today, there is an ever-increasing availability of global DEMs for scientific applications. The 12 m TanDEM-X, 30 m TanDEM-X Edited, 30 m Copernicus, and 30 m FABDEM global DEMs, along with the 5 m Turkish national DEM were compared in this study. While the global DEMs result from interferometric synthetic aperture radar, the Turkish DEM is produced by stereo-photogrammetry. The assessment was conducted in forested and non-forested settings. The validation was done using the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) LiDAR. Generally, FABDEM emerged as the most reliable DEM, achieving the best performance in three settings (whole area RMSE: 2.93 m; forest RMSE: 3.98 m; >70 % canopy closure RMSE: 4.31 m). In contrast, the Turkish national DEM outperformed the other DEMs in two settings (non-forest RMSE: 1.54 m; <70 % canopy closure RMSE: 2.83 m). Global DEMs with improved accuracies may soon replace authoritative national DEMs for various applications. (c) 2025 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.