Spaceborne remote sensing of the world’s protected areas

Abstract

There has been a rapid evolution of satellites, sensors, and techniques to measure, monitor, and manage terrestrial protected areas. There are over 100,000 protected areas around the world and most lack important information on the status and trends of natural resource issues. We review advances and limitations in spaceborne remote sensing that can be applied to all terrestrial protected areas around the world. There have been significant advances in baseline vegetation mapping and land cover classifications by combining field data, data from multiple sensors, and classification techniques. However, global classifications on the extent of non-forest vegetation types (e.g. grasslands and shrublands) are still needed at 30 m pixel resolution. High spatial (< 1 m) and spectral (220 bands) resolution sensors have provided important data on environmental issues (e.g. invasive species, degradation) that are region or site specific. Advances in monitoring protected areas have primarily focused on forest ecosystems and land cover dynamics in and around protected areas using time series data. Landsat imagery can be used to monitor vegetation extent and dynamics at 30 m pixel resolution across the globe, while the MODIS sensors are more appropriate for monthly updates on trends of ecosystem health in protected areas. There has also been an increase in time series remote sensing datasets on anthropogenic impacts, such as light pollution, fire, and land surface temperature, that can be used for all protected areas. Future geographic research should focus on developing global protocols and incorporating near real time and annual metrics that can easily be used by natural resource managers to assess the status and trends of all protected areas.

Changes in NDVI and human population in protected areas on the Tibetan Plateau

“…Protected areas are widely regarded as one of the most successful measures implemented for the conservation of biodiversity, drawing upon traditional and communitybased approaches, governance regimes, scientific and traditional knowledge, and contemporary practices of governments and conservation agencies (IUCN 2014;Gillespie, Willis, and Ostermann-Kelm 2015). Since the 1980s, China has made great strides in developing their protected areas network from less than 200 designated nature reserves in 1982 to 745 internationally recognized protected areas in 2018 that covered 17 percent of China's land surface (Cao, Peng, and Liu 2015;UNEP-WCMC and IUCN 2018).…”

The Contribution of Physical Geographers to Sustainability Research

“…The impacts of light pollution, human-caused fire, and land-surface temperature change in protected areas can be measured by satellite remote sensing [64]. The various impacts of United Kingdom peatland management practices have been investigated and seen as being timely in terms of the European Union Water Framework Directive's implementation [65].…”

Protection status and national socio‐economic context shape land conversion in and around a key transboundary protected area complex in West Africa

“…SRS‐based approaches have already been used for terrestrial protected area monitoring, to create baseline maps of vegetation, track change in vegetation condition over time and monitor anthropogenic impacts (Gillespie et al. , ; Fraser et al. ; Huang et al.…”

“…Satellite remote sensing (SRS) data offers an opportunity to address this problem because it allows the standardized monitoring of multiple protected areas across large spatial extents (Pettorelli et al 2012;Nagendra et al 2013). SRS-based approaches have already been used for terrestrial protected area monitoring, to create baseline maps of vegetation, track change in vegetation condition over time and monitor anthropogenic impacts (Gillespie et al 2008(Gillespie et al , 2015Fraser et al 2009;Huang et al 2009;Tang et al 2010). Additionally, using SRS allows simultaneous monitoring of protected areas and their surrounding landscape (Wright et al 2007;Gillespie et al 2008), which makes it possible to gauge the impact of pressures arising from outside protected areas (DeFries et al 2010;Laurance et al 2012).…”