An overview of recent remote sensing and GIS based research in ecological informatics

Abstract

This article provides an overview of some of the recent research in ecological informatics involving remote sensing and GIS. Attention focuses on a selected range of issues including topics such as the nature of remote sensing data sets, issues of accuracy and uncertainty, data visualization and sharing activities as well as developments in aspects of ecological modeling research. It is shown that considerable advances have been made over recent years and foundations for future research established. BackgroundGeotechnology has been couched as one of the three "mega-technologies" of the 21 st century, along with nanotechnology and biotechnology (Gewin, 2004). On the cusp of the second decade of the 21 st century it is evident that recent developments in the geotechnologies of Geographic Information Science (GIS) and remote sensing have had a substantial impact on ecological research, providing spatial data and associated information to enable the further understanding of ecological systems (Rundell et al., 2009). In a digital society there is sometimes an expectation that information is just a click away and this may apply to spatial information in the domain of ecological informatics. Indeed, it has been in the last five years that developments in and relating to the fields of GIS and remote sensing, such as those seen in internet technologies (e.g., Web 2.0; high performance communication networks; Brunt et al., 2007), sensing technology (e.g., quantum well infrared photodetectors; Krabach, 2000), data standards and interoperability (e.g., OGC® KML 2.2) and spatially explicit modeling (e.g., Osborne et al., 2007), have resulted in the revelation of previously unobservable phenomena and posing of what might be termed second generation of ecological questions. During this time we have also seen more support for the open exchange of data and software and infrastructure for location based services. This paper serves as a review of some of the recent developments in GIS and remote sensing that have been or promises to be of benefit to ecological informatics. The subjects addressed are necessarily selective and limited in scope, drawing on topics of interest to us and, we hope, to you.

Detecting land use and land cover changes in Northern German agricultural landscapes to assess ecosystem service dynamics

“…Because they provide different ecosystem services, the distinction between these crop types represents a valuable database for a detailed ecosystem service assessment as different crops account for different provisioning services and influence regulating services, such as erosion control, and cultural services differently (de Vries et al 2010). Depending on the availability of imagery and ground truth data remote sensing presents a further advantage to obtain LULC data over long time series (Boyd and Foody 2011). Therefore, this study benefited from the long data archive of Landsat TM imagery (Cohen and Goward 2004).…”

“…In contrast, changes of LULC in large fields showed higher accuracies; the larger area superimposed positional errors and is not as affected by mixed land covers. Nevertheless, classifying a heterogeneous landscape into 9 or 10 semantic classes on the basis of 30 m spatial resolution always represents a model of reality and involves errors, for instance the explained mixed land covers in one pixel (Boyd and Foody 2011).…”

Evaluation of state and community/private forests in Punjab, Pakistan using geospatial data and related techniques

“…Very High Resolution (VHR) satellite imagery on large scale maps (1:50,000 up to 1:5,000) is much simpler and more cost effective than aerial photographs. It is also efficient in terms of mathematical modeling for further analysis to extract parameters for decision making (Boyd and Foody 2011). With the advent of VHR satellite data, it is possible to derive detailed LCLU information compatible with watershed-level planning and management decisions (Mathieu et al 2007;Pu et al 2011).…”

Geospatial web services for limnological data: a case study of sensor observation service for ecological observations

“…For ecological data, the field of Ecoinformatics has been providing the informatics tools -including GIS technologiesfor data collection, storage and sharing; in such a way to understand, predict and confront the actual environmental issues (Boyd and Foody, 2011;Brunt et al, 2002;Dengler et al, 2011;Hale and Hollister, 2009;Michener and Jones, 2012).…”