Exploring Natura 2000 Habitats by Satellite Image Segmentation: a case study from the Čierny Balog area (Central Slovakia)

Abstract

Natura 2000 is a network of protected areas covering Europe's most valuable and threatened species and habitats. Recently, biota belonging to these networks have been threatened by both climate change and various human impacts. Regular monitoring is needed to ensure effective protection and proper management measures in these sites and habitats, but conventional field approaches are often time-consuming and inaccurate. New approaches and studies with different focuses and results are being developed. Our approach includes point data from field research and phytosociological databases as starting points for automatic segmentation, which has been developed just recently as a novel method that could help to connect ground-based and remote sensing data. The main aim of our case study is to apply advanced remotely sensed techniques to map the area and condition of vegetation units. We focus on forest habitats belonging mainly to the Natura 2000 network in the area of Čierny Balog village (Central Slovakia). We concentrated on the verification of the possibilities of differentiation of various habitats using only multispectral Sentinel-2 satellite data. New software created by our team called NaturaSat was used to reach our objectives. In the identified areas, spectral characteristics were calculated using software tools, which were subsequently processed and tested statistically. We obtained significant differences between forest habitat types that provided promising results and verification of the methods used. This type of new habitat identification is necessary for the automatic monitoring of habitat areas and changes in conditions by remote sensing.