Abstract
The classification of plant associations and their mapping play a key role in defining habitat biodiversity management, monitoring, and conservation strategies. In this work we present a methodological framework to map Mediterranean forest plant associations and habitats that relies on the application of the Functional Principal Component Analysis (FPCA) to the remotely sensed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series. FPCA, considering the chronological order of the data, reduced the NDVI time series data complexity and provided (as FPCA scores) the main seasonal NDVI phenological variations of the forests. We performed a supervised classification of the FPCA scores combined with topographic and lithological features of the study area to map the forest plant associations. The supervised mapping achieved an overall accuracy of 87.5%. The FPCA scores contributed to the global accuracy of the map much more than the topographic and lithological features. The results showed that (i) the main seasonal phenological variations (FPCA scores) are effective spatial predictors to obtain accurate plant associations and habitat maps; (ii) the FPCA is a suitable solution to simultaneously express the relationships between remotely sensed and ecological field data, since it allows us to integrate these two different perspectives about plant associations in a single graph. The proposed approach based on the FPCA is useful for forest habitat monitoring, as it can contribute to produce periodically detailed vegetation-based habitat maps that reflect the “current” status of vegetation and habitats, also supporting the study of plant associations.
Highlights
Phytosociology, today, plays key roles in European policies dedicated to the conservation of biodiversity, such as the 92/43/EEC Habitats Directive [1] and the Natura 2000 network
In this work we present a methodological framework to map Mediterranean forest plant associations and habitats that relies on the application of the Functional Principal Component Analysis (FPCA) to the remotely sensed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series
The results suggest that the Mediterranean forest plant association has distinct remotely sensed phenological behaviors and that the main seasonal phenological variations, useful to discriminate the contiguous Mediterranean habitats [17,19,20], extracted from the NDVI Landsat 8 time series using FPCA, are efficacy predictors for mapping the forest plant associations
Summary
Phytosociology, today, plays key roles in European policies dedicated to the conservation of biodiversity, such as the 92/43/EEC Habitats Directive [1] and the Natura 2000 network. The phytosociological maps (e.g., plant associations map) can adequately represent the distribution of the habitats and, if updated and repeated, would be helpful in evaluating and monitoring the status of conservation of the habitats [6,7,8]. These activities, to be performed every 6 years, require a lot of resources (i.e., field survey, photo-interpretation) that is constraint making the update of habitat maps difficult due to costs and required time. The accuracy of these maps is often neglected or absent [10,11]
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