Satellite remote sensing for applied ecologists: opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Summary1. Habitat loss and degradation, overexploitation, climate change and the spread of invasive species are drastically depleting the Earth's biological diversity, leading to detrimental impacts on ecosystem services and human well-being. 2. Our ability to monitor the state of biodiversity and the impacts of global environmental change on this natural capital is fundamental to designing effective adaptation and mitigation strategies for preventing further loss of biological diversity. This requires the scientific community to assess spatio-temporal changes in the distribution of abiotic conditions (e.g. temperature, rainfall) and in the distribution, structure, composition and functioning of ecosystems. 3. The potential for satellite remote sensing (SRS) to provide key data has been highlighted by many researchers, with SRS offering repeatable, standardized and verifiable information on long-term trends in biodiversity indicators. SRS permits one to address questions on scales inaccessible to ground-based methods alone, facilitating the development of an integrated approach to natural resource management, where biodiversity, pressures to biodiversity and consequences of management decisions can all be monitored. 4. Synthesis and applications. Here, we provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the prospects of satellite remote sensing (SRS) for ecological applications, reviewing established avenues and highlighting new research and technological developments that have a high potential to make a difference in environmental management. We also discuss current barriers to the ecological application of SRS-based approaches and identify possible ways to overcome some of these limitations.

Assessing ecological habitat structure from local to landscape scales using synthetic aperture radar

“…Therefore, it is very important to develop methods using remote sensing images such as TerraSAR-X radar images, which can be used to monitor hedgerow canopy cover and to detect gaps in hedgerow network structures (Betbeder et al 2014b). Our approach, by analyzing the combination of satellite imagery and biological data, is a step forward in the use of remote sensing data for ecological applications, as advocated by Pettorelli et al (2014). We established a strong correlation between hedgerow canopy cover and the abundance of forest carabid beetles at two scales: i.e.…”

“…Most of the time, the imagery used in ecology is optical remotely sensed imagery (Kerr and Ostrovsky 2003), for instance the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is used for many ecological applications (Pettorelli et al, 2014). NDVI provides information on vegetation distribution and dynamics and can be used to predict animal distribution, abundance etc.…”

Evolution of Cerrado Vegetal Cover on a River Island Based on Orbital Imaging Data

“…Human actions generally promote changes to the environment and lately, have led to different impacts on ecosystems, mainly forests, influencing climate changes, as well as energy and mass exchanges between soil and atmosphere (ACHARD et al, 2014;PETTORELLI et al, 2014;VIEIRA et al, 2013;SILVA et al, 2013;TOWNSHEND et al, 2012;EVA et al, 2012). Awareness of these changes is growing and, therefore, a series of studies have been designed to detect and quantify their extent (ten CATEN et al, 2015;GRECCHI et al, 2014;ROCHA et al, 2011).…”

Improving broad scale forage mapping and habitat selection analyses with airborne laser scanning: the case of moose

“…Remote sensing techniques have great potential to fill this void as they can extract detailed information on biotic or abiotic environmental conditions relevant to ecological studies (Pettorelli et al 2014). Here, we presented a novel use of ALS data to model browse availability at the landscape scale in a managed boreal forest.…”