Supporting habitat management

Many seemingly “wild” areas are in fact actively conserved, with private or public authorities responsible for maintaining their condition to ensure long term sustainability. Within Europe, the Natura 2000 network has been set up to give legal protection to the most sensitive habitats and species.

There is a need to actively manage such areas, mapping the changing distribution of different types of ecosystems within an area, monitoring their condition and tracking any management activities performed. Authorities also need to get early warnings of any conditions affecting the habitat (such as droughts, wildfires or diseases), and to monitor the progress of any recovery. In many cases it is of interest to look at what services such ecosystems provide, for example in terms or carbon storage or provision of timber.

To this extent, satellite data provide frequent images with a wide coverage. Monitoring the spectral signature of optical bands gives an indication of the type and health of vegetation present. Thermal imagery can be used to estimate evapotranspiration, a key indicator of vegetation health. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) gives an indication of the roughness of vegetation, which can help distinguish between healthy cover and bare branches. Combining these different parameters gives a wide range of indicators that can be used to map and assess the condition of different ecosystems.

Feature image credit: European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery

Habitat Mapping

Earth observation is very suitable to mapping different types of habitats. ESA projects such as WorldCover have looked at creating global maps of land cover; these then feed into operational products such as those coming from CLMS. Such large-scale maps also inform ecosystem accounts, giving statistics on habitat distributions within a country or region. Other projects have looked at mapping specific types of habitats, such as wetlands, peatlands, or inland water.

Figure: Wetland inventory map for Uganda. Source: here.

Ecosystem Restoration

Because EO data provide frequent acquisitions they can be used for monitoring changes over time. This is useful for monitoring the progress restoration efforts. The PEOPLE-ER project has developed open-source tools that use the optical spectra of vegetation to monitor its recovery from a range of events, with some case studies performed worldwide.

Figure: A satellite image of the forest fires in Greece at the end of August; devastating fires are raging in several parts of the world and releasing high emissions. Credit: ESA

Carbon Storage

Satellite data is a key input to assessing the carbon stored in a landscape. Recent ESA projects have focused on carbon storage in soil, forests, peatland and coastal areas. Although these do not give the full picture by themselves, they are important inputs to an overall carbon inventory.

Figure: Graphical User Interface based on web service to allow users downloading the Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) products generated by this monitoring system of WorldSoils project.