The scattering of electromagnetic plane waves by one-dimensional lossy dielectric random rough surfaces containing densely distributed two-dimensional dielectric scatterers is studied. The finite element formulation for random rough surface scattering is extended to include random volume scattering in the lower half-space. An advantage of this method is that the scattering by the discrete scatterers below the dielectric rough surface can be taken into account with only a small increase in computational complexity. The Monte Carlo simulation results show that the presence of volume scattering can have significant effects on the backscattering intensity and bistatic scattering cross section depending on the statistics of the rough surface, the permittivity of the lower half-space, and properties of the discrete scatterers such as sizes, permittivities, and concentrations. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1993