Biodiversity

The Biodiversity pilot will demonstrate the value of a European data hub for the creation of RS-EBVs (Essential Biodiversity Variables), which leads to creating a GEO hub for EBVs by linking the key policy/user network groups (GEO-BON, CBD and IPBES) with the space agencies (via CEOS). Secondly, it demonstrates the use of the European data hub in terms high-resolution RS-EBVs for habitat monitoring in order to support the European Environment Agency (EEA) and its Topic Centre for Biological Diversity (ETC-BD). The integration with in-situ vegetation relévés will play an important role here.

Focus on creating the biodiversity GEO hub: Importantly, the GEOhub will offer sustainability beyond the project lifetime by embedding the biodiversity GEOhub with the GEO Global Initiative GEO-BON. The need for remote sensing for global EBVs is to fill the spatial and temporal gaps between in situ observation biodiversity data. Several steps remain in order to actualize the acquisition of the observations needed for these remote sensing EBVs. GEO, through its Global Initiative GEO BON, proposes to act as a hub to facilitate iterative discussion between space agencies (via CEOS) and key policy bodies (CBD, IPBES).
Demonstrating the use of high-resolution RS-EBVs for habitat monitoring: It demonstrates the use of high-resolution RS-EBVs for habitat monitoring in order to support among others the EEA and ETC/BD. These organisations have special responsibilities with regard to European habitats, with specific emphasis on the reporting obligations towards the Birds and Habitat Directives. The spatial identification of European habitats and related changes are a difficult task, and much effort is nowadays being put in the spatial identification of EUNIS habitat types. Remote sensing data could play a much larger role than it has now, and good integration of the large amount of in-situ field observations (vegetation plots) with high-resolution RS-EBVs is key. The integration of high-resolution RS-EBVs is demonstrated for forest and heathland habitats.

TESTIMONIALS

Testimonial by Elnaz Neinavez, Researcher at University of Twente

Testimonial by Sander Mücher, Senior Researcher at Wageningen Environmental Research

QUICK FACTS

Geographical Area

The Biodiversity Pilot focuses on Europe. Although some of the Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) such as Leaf Area Index (LAI) is conducted at the global scale.

Data Sources

To produce European habitat suitability maps, the following data sources where used:

Environmental predictors such as potential evapotranspiration, solar radiation, seasonality, mean temperature, annual precipitation, distance to water, bulk density of the soil, cation exchange capacity of the soil, soil organic carbon content, soil pH, etc.
RS-EBV’s: such as LAI, vegetation phenology, land cover, leaf nitrogen content, inundation, vegetation height.
More than 1 million recorded in-situ vegetation plots related to European EUNIS habitats

Moreover, EBVs ancillary products, which are available online have been populated at the NextGEOSS catalogue as follow:

Digital height_of the Netherlands
Global Landcover
Global Bio-climatic variables
Climate variables
Topography distance to the water
Global surface water occurrence change intensity
Global surface water occurrence
Global surface water maximum water extent
Global surface water recurrence
Global surface water transitions
Global surface water seasonality
Vegetation height
Species occurrence
Global potential evapotranspiration
Corine Landcover
Pan-European High-Resolution Layers

For more details see: Description of European RS-EBV’s and abiotic site conditions

To produce the Leaf Area Index the following data source was applied:

Satellite high-resolution data (Sentinel-2)

Target Community

The focus is on supporting a biodiversity GEOhub and modelling the spatial distribution of European habitats, which serve the various biodiversity communities (not only GEO-BON, CBD and IPBES, EEA, ETC/BD, and many smaller organisations interested in biodiversity). The services facilitate biodiversity monitoring and provide the first level of concept between low-level primary observation and high-level biodiversity indicators as required by researchers, science institutions, stakeholders, decision-makers, among others.

Community Portal

Explore NextGEOSS Biodiversity Monitoring and Mapping community portal, and the NextGEOSS Habitat Mapping community portal to access the Biodiversity pilot services. The portal allows running habitat distribution models in the cloud. The resulting habitat suitability maps can be viewed in the browser and downloaded.

Results on NextGEOSS Catalogue

The Biodiversity pilot is focused on creating the biodiversity GEOhub for RS-EBV’s, to support the GEOSS European Hub and provide full interoperability of biodiversity data. It demonstrates as well the use of RS-EBVs for habitat monitoring by spatial modelling of EUNIS habitats (maps with the spatial distribution of habitats). The main results can be described as the following:

The unique added value of the NextGEOSS platform for the ‘Biodiversity’ pilot (e.g. European EBV data hub) is that users can find and harvest the available continuous and ancillary EBV products provided by various space agencies, national and international organizations at different scales (e.g. local, national and global);
In addition, users can also retrieve and compute critical EBVs using remotely sensed high-resolution data (i.e., Sentinel-2) using global empiric approaches by selecting the time period for which users wish to call data and specifying the maximum cloud cover percentage;
Habitat mapping community portal.
The portal allows running habitat distribution models in the cloud. The resulting habitat suitability maps can be viewed in the browser and downloaded.

Learn more about the pilot results at NextGEOSS Catalogue/Thematic Areas/Biodiversity. You can explore the pilot data sets at Crop Monitoring for Food Security Pilot outputs from ITC University of Twente and Crop Monitoring for Food Security Pilot outputs from Wageningen Environmental Research.