Abstract
Forest ecosystems provide a range of services and function as habitats for many species. The concept of woodland key habitats (WKH) is important for biodiversity management in forest planning standards and certification schemes. The main idea of the WKH is to preserve biodiversity hotspots in the forest landscape. Current methods used in delineating WKH rely on costly field inventories. Furthermore, it is well known that the surveyor introduces an error because of the subjective assessment. Remote sensing may reduce this error in a cost-efficient way. The current study develops automated methods using airborne laser scanning (ALS) data to delineate geomorphological WKH, i.e., rock walls and stream gorges. The methods were evaluated based on a complete field inventory of WKH in a 1600 ha area in south-eastern Norway. The delineated WKH showed high detection rates, minor omission errors, but high commissions errors. Combining the delineation into a map of potential WKH suitable to guide field surveyors resulted in detecting all field reference WKH, i.e., a detection rate of 100% and a commission error of 25%. It is concluded that a higher degree of automatization might be possible to improve results and increase the efficiency of WKH inventories.
Highlights
Forest ecosystems provide a range of services and are habitats for many species [1].Forest management and activities influence the amount and quality of available habitats.In Europe, clear-felling is the primary driver of changes in forest ecosystems [2]
Using the airborne laser scanning (ALS)-derived digital elevation model (DTM), we found that two reference polygons were prone to errors
The current study showed that directly translating a field inventory protocol might be challenging when developing a remote sensing product such as this
Summary
Forest ecosystems provide a range of services and are habitats for many species [1].Forest management and activities influence the amount and quality of available habitats.In Europe, clear-felling is the primary driver of changes in forest ecosystems [2]. Forest ecosystems provide a range of services and are habitats for many species [1]. At the end of the last century, the impacts of forest management on biodiversity were recognized as an important issue. Biodiversity management in forestry received increased attention [3], and the concept of woodland key habitats (WKH) was introduced as an addition to traditional forest protection in many countries, especially in the Nordic and Baltic countries [3–5]. The main idea of the WKH is to preserve small important biodiversity hotspots in the forest landscape [3]. The basic idea of the concept is that red-list species occur in clusters and are not randomly distributed in the forest landscape [6]. Identifying the specific habitats where red-listed species are clustered provided an efficient and practical approach
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