Potential of Remote Sensing as Landscape Structure and Biodiversity Indicator

The Convention of Biological Diversity (1992) was signed to provide an international framework for the conservation of biodiversity. The signing states agreed to take actions in reducing the current rate of biodiversity loss by the year 2010. Achieving this target requires rapid and cost efficient methods to monitor and understand the causal relationship between human activities and their impacts on biodiversity. As fragmentation related to human development is identified being a major cause for the decline of many endangered species, one of the challenges in conservation efforts is to understand the dynamics of spatially structured populations. This book focuses on the development of Remote Sensing indicators for landscape structure and biodiversity studies. Land use intensity in eight European countries is analysed with patch indices and image grey values. Segmentation, classification and spatial object recognition are discussed as well as spatial uncertainties and scale problems in digital image processing are dealt with. Multivariate statistical techniques are reviewed and the derived spatial indicators are linked to observed biological data through spatial-statistical models.