Alpha and beta diversity mapping in Indian tropical deciduous forests using high-fidelity imaging spectroscopy

Effects of Spatial Resolution, Mapping Window Size, and Spectral Species Clustering on Remote Sensing of Plant Beta Diversity Using biodivMapR and Hyperspectral Imagery

“…Results of our analysis provide new insights into the effects of spatial resolution of remote sensing imagery on identification of beta diversity using the spectral species concept. Most studies investigating effects of spatial resolution on the utility of spectral species have prioritized matching pixel size with the crown size of individual plants for estimation of alpha or beta plant diversity (Féret & Asner, 2014; Gholizadeh et al., 2020; Kishore et al., 2023; Rossi et al., 2022). In this study we accepted a priori that imagery with spatial resolution of 1 m or greater would result in mixed pixels in most of the community types studied (Rocchini et al., 2021).…”

“…However, as the size of pixels increasingly exceeds the size of individual plant species, the assumption that spectral species relate to characteristics of individual plants quickly becomes untenable (Chraibi et al., 2022; Féret & Asner, 2014; Féret and de Boissieu, 2020; Gamon et al., 2020; Gholizadeh et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2018). Correlations between spectral diversity and plant species diversity, though often greatly underestimating the latter, have been detected at spatial resolutions ranging up to 30 m (Gamon et al., 2020; Gastauer et al., 2022; Gholizadeh et al., 2019; Kishore et al., 2023; Liccari et al., 2022; Rocchini, 2007; Zhang et al., 2023). However, within the range of spatial resolutions suggested for the SBG mission (30–45 m), such estimates of plant taxonomic diversity presumably will not be useful in certain environments (Rocchini et al., 2022).…”