Remote sensing for restoration planning: how the big picture can inform stakeholders

Abstract

The use of remote sensing in ecosystem management has transformed how land managers, practitioners, and policymakers evaluate ecosystem loss, gain, and change at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Less developed is the use of these spatial tools for planning, implementing, and evaluating ecosystem restoration projects and especially so in multifunctional landscapes. We use a case study approach in a multistakeholder tropical dryland restoration project to highlight the potential of remotely sensed products to quantitatively and economically guide often conflicting restoration priorities with stakeholder objectives. High‐resolution digital elevation models derived from an airborne remote sensing platform informed land managers tasked with endangered species restoration by guiding their efforts to highly suitable areas of the landscape where plant growth, performance, and survival should be greater. In turn, satellite‐based monitoring offered a temporal approach to broadly quantify vegetation fire risk in order to restrict fire promoting activities in dry landscapes most modified by fire promoting invasive grasses. Together, the delineation of high suitability areas for plant‐based restoration and low suitability areas for wildfire management ultimately releases moderate suitability land for alternative land uses deemed important in multistakeholder landscapes. We review the benefits of using remotely sensed data for restoration planning, and highlight the costs and benefits of various data sources.

Emerging approaches to successful ecological restoration: five imperatives to guide innovation

“…We were struck, reading these eight papers, at how often we saw evidence of deep understanding of, and sympathy with, the resource limitations and practical needs of land managers. One major goal of the new approaches was to maximize resource efficiency: focusing intensive efforts on a limited space (Hulvey et al ), optimizing interventions for particular areas of the landscape (Cordell et al ), seeking species assemblages that have the most long‐term value (Butterfield et al ; Laughlin et al ). The paper by Schelfhout et al (), which concerns Nardus grasslands in Belgium, creates a decision tool for managers to assess the most appropriate method of depleting P levels in these overfertilized grasslands.…”

Influence of climate, post‐treatment weather extremes, and soil factors on vegetation recovery after restoration treatments in the southwestern US

“…Vegetation cover and greenness metrics based on remote sensing can provide complementary monitoring following land treatments and restoration activities where ground‐based plots are absent or sparse (Honey‐Rosés, Maurer, Ramírez, & Corbera, ; Johnston, Beever, Merkle, & Chong, ; Malmstrom et al., ; Meroni et al., ; Waller, Villarreal, Poitras, Nauman, & Duniway, ). In particular, the long‐term and global extent of readily‐accessible imagery from Landsat and MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) could be widely used to understand restoration trends across unmonitored areas or timeperiods (Cordell et al., ), as they are currently being used to deliver cover of different plant functional types across the entire western US (Jones et al., ).…”

Information from Earth Observation for the Management of Sustainable Land Use and Land Cover in Brazil: An Analysis of User Needs

“…Earth Observation (EO) is the process of gathering information about an object from a distance and uses a sensor, usually located on a satellite, to record information about a point of interest [1]. Some EO data and products are available free to the user, from agencies such as the United States Geological Survey (USGS), The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE).…”