Temporal dynamic analysis of a mountain ecosystem based on multi‐source and multi‐scale remote sensing data

Abstract

Citation: Ibarrola-Ulzurrun, E., J. Marcello, C. Gonzalo-Mart ın, and J. L. Mart ın-Esquivel. 2019. Temporal dynamic analysis of a mountain ecosystem based on multi-source and multi-scale remote sensing data. Ecosphere 10(6):Abstract. During the last decades, ecosystems have suffered a decline in natural resources due to climate change and anthropogenic pressure. Specifically, the European rabbit introduced by humans, as well as drought episodes, have led to a change in the vegetation structure of a mountainous ecosystem: Teide National Park in Spain. Teide managers studied, with field-based traditional methods, how the two keystone vegetation species, Spartocytisus supranubius and Pterocephalus lasiospermus, have changed their dynamics in this vulnerable and heterogenic ecosystem. However, remote sensing is an important tool for classifying, monitoring, and managing large areas in a fast and economic way. This work proposes a methodological framework to monitor the changes produced in this protected area using multi-source remote sensing imagery. The results strengthen and extend the analysis followed by the National Park managers, demonstrating that S. supranubius has decreased its population while P. lasiospermus has increased. Moreover, this study presents thematic maps of the species of interest, as well as its specific coverage at different dates, providing quantitative data difficult to get with traditional approaches.

Habitat Loss and Biotic Velocity Response to Climate Change for Alpine Plant Species in Atlantic Oceanic Islands

“…External factors can hinder the arrival and establishment of migrants, such as elevated or steep slopes [13] or geologically recent areas and rocky areas with scarce soil development [42], as our data show especially on Tenerife. Other factors that can inhibit the expected species trajectories showed by the models but that have not been considered in this study are the presence of invasive herbivores (Barbary sheep, mouflons, and rabbits) [51][52][53][54] or trait-based factors of species [55,56] such as their current location, number of individuals, and seed dispersion methods, which are especially important for threatened species [44]. Our study highlights a general trend of higher vulnerability of threatened and single island endemics in some of the addressed scenarios, as also found elsewhere [57] although it was not always significant, which could reveal there are also some common species with high vulnerability.…”

Change Detection analysis of Cultural and Landscape Heritage based on Multispectral and Hyperspectral remote sensing data and algorithm: the case of Appia Antica Park

“…Limited to this work we are interested in the pigments that reflects in red and near infrared range. Two different ways to monitoring these absorption (that reflects the health of vegetation [9]) are used and compared each other to distinguish vegetation presence and status in the image. These methods are: 1) the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI [10]) for the multispectral data (from the multispectral satellite Sentinel 2 [11]) and a Red Edge Score map that assign at each pixel of the image a number that measures the slope of its spectral signature in the red edge range (from the hyperspectral satellite "PRecursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa", PRISMA [12]).…”

Advanced Processing of Multiplatform Remote Sensing Imagery for the Monitoring of Coastal and Mountain Ecosystems

“…Multispectral (MS) satellite sensors have been used for many decades, however, more recently, hyperspectral (HS) imagery has been considered to map vegetation or benthic habitats at high resolution [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Unfortunately, high spatial HS sensors onboard satellites are not available nowadays and, as a result, airborne or RPAS HS instruments are the only options to map complex habitats environments at the maximum spatial and spectral resolutions.…”