Mapping Natura 2000 Habitat Conservation Status in a Pannonic Salt Steppe with Airborne Laser Scanning

Abstract

Natura 2000 Habitat Conservation Status is currently evaluated based on fieldwork. However, this is proving to be unfeasible over large areas. The use of remote sensing is increasingly encouraged but covering the full range of ecological variables by such datasets and ensuring compatibility with the traditional assessment methodology has not been achieved yet. We aimed to test Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) as a source for mapping all variables required by the local official conservation status assessment scheme and to develop an automated method that calculates Natura 2000 conservation status at 0.5 m raster resolution for 24 km 2 of Pannonic Salt Steppe habitat (code 1530). We used multi-temporal (summer and winter) ALS point clouds with full-waveform recording and a density of 10 pt/m 2 . Some required variables were derived from ALS product rasters; others involved vegetation classification layers calculated by machine learning and fuzzy categorization. Thresholds separating favorable and unfavorable values of each variable required by the national assessment scheme were manually calibrated from 10 plots where field-based assessment was carried out. Rasters representing positive and negative scores for each input variable OPEN ACCESSRemote Sens. 2015, 7 2992were integrated in a ruleset that exactly follows the Hungarian Natura 2000 assessment scheme for grasslands. Accuracy of each parameter and the final conservation status score and category was evaluated by 10 independent assessment plots. We conclude that ALS is a suitable data source for Natura 2000 assessments in grasslands, and that the national grassland assessment scheme can successfully be used as a GIS processing model for conservation status, ensuring that the output is directly comparable with traditional field based assessments.

Biodiversity Mapping via Natura 2000 Conservation Status and Ebv Assessment Using Airborne Laser Scanning in Alkali Grasslands

“…The methodology used for data collection and processing is described in detail in (Zlinszky et al, 2015a) and briefly summarized here. The study area is Ágota-puszta (Fig.…”

“…In this study we revisit a dataset collected originally for the purpose of developing LIDAR as a tool for Natura 2000 monitoring (Zlinszky et al, 2015a) from the perspective of identifying potential EBV-s. The original study aimed to create proxies for all variables required by the national Natura 2000 monitoring guidelines, using only LIDAR data and field references, and based on these, to create a high-resolution complete Natura 2000 conservation status assessment for the study area.…”

“…The site is used for extensive cattle grazing. Field references were collected at two individual levels (Zlinszky et al, 2015a): for the individual classifications and for the final Natura 2000 conservation status. Both datasets were split with half of the polygons used for calibration and half retained for accuracy evaluation.…”

Will It Blend? Visualization and Accuracy Evaluation of High-Resolution Fuzzy Vegetation Maps

“…These modules are part of a full data processing chain using Python as a glue language. The full software solution (under the working name "Vegetation Classification Studio") has been used for classification tasks in various habitats from airborne LIDAR data (Zlinszky et al, 2015a(Zlinszky et al, , 2014.…”

“…The example we present here is a classification of various grassland categories from a study site in Püspökladány, Hungary. Details about the sensor and field data collection, categories and processing are published in Zlinszky et al, (2015a). The example dataset we show here contains 6 classes and covers 88 088 000 pixels of 0.5×0.5 m resolution.…”