Abstract
Maintaining a healthy ecosystem is essential for maximizing sustainable ecological services of the best quality to human beings. Ecological and conservation research has provided a strong scientific background on identifying ecological health indicators and correspondingly making effective conservation plans. At the same time, ecologists have asserted a strong need for spatially explicit and temporally effective ecosystem health assessments based on remote sensing data. Currently, remote sensing of ecosystem health is only based on one ecosystem attribute: vigor, organization, or resilience. However, an effective ecosystem health assessment should be a comprehensive and dynamic measurement of the three attributes. This paper reviews opportunities of remote sensing, including optical, radar, and LiDAR, for directly estimating indicators of the three ecosystem attributes, discusses the main challenges to develop a remote sensing-based spatially-explicit comprehensive ecosystem health system, and provides some future perspectives. The main challenges to develop a remote sensing-based spatially-explicit comprehensive ecosystem health system are: (1) scale issue; (2) transportability issue; (3) data availability; and (4) uncertainties in health indicators estimated from remote sensing data. However, the Radarsat-2 constellation, upcoming new optical sensors on Worldview-3 and Sentinel-2 satellites, and improved technologies for the acquisition and processing of hyperspectral, multi-angle optical, radar, and LiDAR data and multi-sensoral data fusion may partly address the current challenges.
Highlights
Nature supplies food and recreation that human beings rely on
Other indicators that are directly or indirectly associated with Net Primary Productivity (NPP) are green vegetation cover, green vegetation biomass, Non-Photosynthetic Vegetation (NPV) cover or biomass, green ratio, bare soil cover and Biological Soil Crust (BSC) cover in semiarid and arid regions, and vegetation biological properties
Radar and LiDAR remote sensing which have an advantage to detect the structure of NPV can be good data sources for NPV estimation
Summary
Nature supplies food and recreation that human beings rely on. ecosystems worldwide are threatened by anthropological activities and climate change [1]. Remote sensing data have potential for assessing and monitoring ecosystem health at different temporal and spatial scales across extensive areas with a broad extent [12,15] They can be used for directly detailing ecological health indictors, such as productivity, species richness, and resilience after natural and human-induced disturbances [12] and for indirectly providing inputs for spatially explicit ecological process modeling [16]. A comprehensive and dynamic ecosystem health assessment with the integration of ecosystem vigor, organization, and resilience is urgently needed Establishing such a spatially explicit EHA and monitoring system needs the close collaboration of both remote sensing specialists and ecologists [25]. The third section summarizes a number of studies and reviews on predicting ecosystem health indicators of the ecosystem attributes: vigor, organization and resilience using remote sensing imagery. A detailed introduction on how to select ecological indicators can be found in [10]
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