Abstract
The monitoring of ecosystems alterations has become a crucial task in order to develop valuable habitats for rare and threatened species. The information extracted from hyperspectral remote sensing data enables the generation of highly spatially resolved analyses of such species’ habitats. In our study we combine information from a species ordination with hyperspectral reflectance signatures to predict occurrence probabilities for Natura 2000 habitat types and their conservation status. We examine how accurate habitat types and habitat threat, expressed by pressure indicators, can be described in an ordination space using spatial correlation functions from the geostatistic approach. We modeled habitat quality assessment parameters using floristic gradients derived by non-metric multidimensional scaling on the basis of 58 field plots. In the resulting ordination space, the variance structure of habitat types and pressure indicators could be explained by 69% up to 95% with fitted variogram models with a correlation to terrestrial mapping of >0.8. Models could be used to predict habitat type probability, habitat transition, and pressure indicators continuously over the whole ordination space. Finally, partial least squares regression (PLSR) was used to relate spectral information from AISA DUAL imagery to floristic pattern and related habitat quality. In general, spectral transferability is supported by strong correlation to ordination axes scores (R2 = 0.79–0.85), whereas second axis of dry heaths (R2 = 0.13) and first axis for pioneer grasslands (R2 = 0.49) are more difficult to describe.
Highlights
In response to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), the European Union adopted the Habitats Directive for the establishment of a coherent network of protected sites for rare, threatened, or endemic species and habitat types
A third of all samples per bootstrap iteration were excluded from the nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMS) ordination in each bootstrap iteration [71], the average correlation over all iterations with n = 1000 samples was high at C = 0.969 for the first axis and C = 0.956 for the second axis (Figure 3b)
The α threshold was undershot, and it could be alternatively assumed that reference ordination space represents significant floristic structures
Summary
In response to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), the European Union adopted the Habitats Directive for the establishment of a coherent network of protected sites for rare, threatened, or endemic species and habitat types. This network, called Natura 2000, is aimed at preserving and restoring ecological interdependencies, dispersal, and establishment processes. To obtain relevant knowledge about the spatial dynamic of ecological processes that influence the conservation status of habitats, spatially explicit data on the location and distribution of species are required [2]
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