Evaluating the Relationships of Phenological and Inter-Annual Landscape Dynamics with Farmland Biodiversity using Multi-Spatial and Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

Agricultural landscapes are highly variable ecosystems and are home to many species. Farmland spatial heterogeneity and phenological and inter-annual agricultural landscape dynamics has been shown to be related to species diversity. Remote sensing provides data that enable monitoring landscape changes at multiple temporal and spatial scales. The goal of this research was to determine the response of biodiversity to phenological and inter-annual landscape dynamics. The study area is the predominantly agricultural region of eastern Ontario. Ninety-three sample landscapes were selected prior to this research. Biodiversity data were collected during the summers of 2011 and 2012 within a 1 × 1 km area at each landscape. This extent and 3 × 3 km were selected for this research to analyze the impacts of spatial scale on biodiversity response. Relationships between biodiversity and vegetation phenology were modelled using MODIS NDVI, while relationships between biodiversity and long term inter-annual vegetation changes were modelled using Landsat NDVI and Tasseled Cap components. Random Forest Regression was used to determine relative variable importance over the many biodiversity models produced. The most important variables were identified and subsequently used in step-wise regression to determine model significance, the landscape variables entered, and the direction of their relationship with biodiversity. Results demonstrated that phenological and inter-annual changes in vegetation dynamics were related to biodiversity. For MODIS, most 3 × 3 km models were significant, whereas most 1 × 1 km models were not. For Landsat, model performance was not consistently different for the two extents, indicating that model performance can depend on landscape extent when coarse spatial resolution data are used. Plant diversity was lower when the time of onset of greenness I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Doug King for taking me on as a student, mentoring me and supporting me both academically and emotionally both during my whole PhD journey and the thesis process. Thank you for encouraging me during hard times and having faith in me and my way and thank you for all you time and energy and being available to discuss various issues throughout this entire process. I also would like to thank my committee members Dr. Scott Mitchell and Dr. Dennis Duro for providing valuable advice and feedback throughout various stages of this thesis. I would like to thank the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University for providing me with great financial support and scholarships, teaching assistantship and instructor positions. I am grateful to the Geomatics and Landscape Ecology (GLEL) Lab and to NSERC for providing the funding for this research through a Strategic Project Grant to Drs. Fahrig, King, Lindsay and Mitchell and through a Discovery Grant to Dr. King. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my colleagues at Agriculture and Agrifood Canada, Science and Technology Branch, Earth Observation (STB...