Abstract

Recent progress in remote sensing provides much-needed, large-scale spatio-temporal information on habitat structures important for biodiversity conservation. Here we examine the potential of a newly launched satellite-borne radar system (Sentinel-1) to map the biodiversity of twelve taxa across five temperate forest regions in central Europe. We show that the sensitivity of radar to habitat structure is similar to that of airborne laser scanning (ALS), the current gold standard in the measurement of forest structure. Our models of different facets of biodiversity reveal that radar performs as well as ALS; median over twelve taxa by ALS and radar are 0.51 and 0.57 respectively for the first non-metric multidimensional scaling axes representing assemblage composition. We further demonstrate the promising predictive ability of radar-derived data with external validation based on the species composition of birds and saproxylic beetles. Establishing new area-wide biodiversity monitoring by remote sensing will require the coupling of radar data to stratified and standardized collected local species data.

Details

Title
Radar vision in the mapping of forest biodiversity from space
Author
Bae, Soyeon 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Levick, Shaun R 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Heidrich, Lea 1 ; Magdon, Paul 3   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Leutner, Benjamin F 4   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Wöllauer, Stephan 5   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Serebryanyk, Alla 6 ; Nauss, Thomas 5   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Krzystek, Peter 6 ; Gossner, Martin M 7   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Schall, Peter 8 ; Heibl, Christoph 9   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Bässler, Claus 10 ; Doerfler, Inken 11 ; Schulze, Ernst-Detlef 12 ; Franz-Sebastian Krah 13   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Culmsee, Heike 14   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Jung, Kirsten 15   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Heurich, Marco 16 ; Fischer, Markus 17 ; Seibold, Sebastian 18   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Thorn, Simon 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Gerlach, Tobias 19 ; Hothorn, Torsten 20 ; Weisser, Wolfgang W 21   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Müller, Jörg 22   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany 
 CSIRO Land and Water, PMB 44, Winnellie, Australia; College of Engineering, IT, and Environment, Charles Darwin University, Winnellie, Australia 
 Forest Inventory and Remote Sensing, Faculty of Forest Sciences and Forest Ecology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany 
 German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD), Earth Observation Center (EOC), German Aerospace Center (DLR), Weßling, Germany 
 Faculty of Geography, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany 
 Department of Geoinformatics, Munich University of Applied Sciences, München, Germany 
 Forest Entomology, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland 
 Silviculture and Forest Ecology of the Temperate Zones, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany 
 Bavarian Forest National Park, Grafenau, Germany 
10  Bavarian Forest National Park, Grafenau, Germany; Terrestrial Ecology Research Group, Department of Ecology and Ecosystem Management, Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany 
11  Terrestrial Ecology Research Group, Department of Ecology and Ecosystem Management, Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany; Institute of Biology and Environmental science, Vegetation science & Nature conservation, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany 
12  Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany 
13  Plant Biodiversity Research Group, Department of Ecology & Ecosystem Management, Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany; Bavarian Forest National Park, Grafenau, Germany 
14  DBU Natural Heritage, German Federal Foundation for the Environment, Osnabrück, Germany 
15  Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation Genomics, University Ulm, Ulm, Germany 
16  Bavarian Forest National Park, Grafenau, Germany; Chair of Wildlife Ecology and Wildlife Management, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany 
17  Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland; Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (SBiK-F), Frankfurt am Main, Germany 
18  Terrestrial Ecology Research Group, Department of Ecology and Ecosystem Management, Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany; Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany 
19  UNESCO-Biosphere Reserve Rhön, Oberelsbach, Germany 
20  Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland 
21  Terrestrial Ecology Research Group, Department of Ecology and Ecosystem Management, Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany 
22  Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany; Bavarian Forest National Park, Grafenau, Germany 
Pages
1-10
Publication year
2019
Publication date
Oct 2019
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20411723
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2306794418
Copyright
© 2019. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.