Translating land cover/land use classifications to habitat taxonomies for landscape monitoring: a Mediterranean assessment

Abstract

Periodic monitoring of biodiversity changes at a landscape scale constitutes a key issue for conservation managers. Earth observation (EO) data offer a potential solution, through direct or indirect mapping of species or habitats. Most national and international programs rely on the use of land cover (LC) and/or land use (LU) classification systems. Yet, these are not as clearly relatable to biodiversity in comparison to habitat classifications, and provide less scope for monitoring. While a conversion from LC/LU classification to habitat classification can be of great utility, differences in definitions and criteria have so far limited the establishment of a unified approach for such translation between these two classification systems.Focusing on five Mediterranean NATURA 2000 sites, this paper considers the scope for three of the most commonly used global LC/LU taxonomies-CORINE Land Cover, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) land cover classification system (LCCS) and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme to be translated to habitat taxonomies. Through both quantitative and expert knowledge based qualitative analysis of selected taxonomies, FAO-LCCS turns out to be the best candidate to cope with the complexity of habitat description and provides a framework for EO and in situ data integration for habitat mapping, reducing uncertainties and class overlaps and bridging the gap between LC/LU and habitats domains for 123Landscape Ecol (2013) 28:905-930 DOI 10.1007 landscape monitoring-a major issue for conservation. This study also highlights the need to modify the FAO-LCCS hierarchical class description process to permit the addition of attributes based on class-specific expert knowledge to select multi-temporal (seasonal) EO data and improve classification. An application of LC/LU to habitat mapping is provided for a coastal Natura 2000 site with high classification accuracy as a result.

Vegetation coverage change in the EU: patterns inside and outside Natura 2000 protected areas

“…CORINE land cover classes do not completely correspond to the Natura 2000 habitat classification scheme (Tomaselli et al 2013). Thus, even though the natural vegetation, and especially forests, were potentially useful for indicating a successful outcome of the EU conservation policy, we highlight the possibility that this could be due to common habitat types (e.g.…”

Expert knowledge for translating land cover/use maps to General Habitat Categories (GHC)

“…The pre-existing LC/LU map (scale 1:5,000) available for Le Cesine site was produced in CORINE taxonomy and validated by in-field campaigns undertaken in 2008-2009. The map was firstly converted from CORINE taxonomy to LCCS taxonomy based on the report of panel of the Global Observation of Forest and Land Cover Dynamics (Herold and Schmullius 2004;Herold et al 2006Herold et al , 2009Tomaselli et al 2013). The LC/LU map for Lago Salso was produced on the basis of a pre-existing vegetation map and orthophoto interpretation and was based on the LCCS taxonomy (scale 1:5,000).…”

“…As well known (Di Gregorio and Jansen 2005;Tomaselli et al 2013), any LCCS class in the map is described by a unique numerical code and a standard name. The alphanumeric elements of the LCCS code correspond to either specific classifiers (i.e., a set of independent diagnostic criteria used to identify each class) or environmental and technical attributes (Di Gregorio and Jansen 2005) useful for class identification.…”

“…Consequently, Tomaselli et al (2013) proposed a framework to translate LCCS classes into habitat categories, with these described according to Annex I to the Habitats Directive (92/43 EEC). The Habitats Directive is the main European Union (EU) legal instrument concerning biodiversity and conservation of natural habitats; its Annex I provides a list of natural habitats of Community interest within the EU and it is of central importance for international reporting and Natura 2000 site management (Ladoux et al 2000;Mehtälä and Vuorisalo 2007).…”

Towards Operational Detection of Forest Ecosystem Changes in Protected Areas

“…The authors used this map, originally produced in CORINE and subsequently translated into the FAO-LCCS taxonomy [24], used as image reference (Figure 1b). …”