Tracking changes to habitats and biodiversity for global assessments and monitoring

Walter Jetz, Yale University, walter.jetz@yale.edu (Presenter)

Ecological functions and services provided by natural habitats and their associated biodiversity are undergoing rapid change worldwide. Contractions and shifts in habitat conditions and species ranges transcend national boundaries and have potentially significant effects on effective resource management, conservation stewardship, and environmental decision-making. Remote sensing combined with in situ habitat and biodiversity observations offer an unrivalled pathway for monitoring, understanding and predicting these changes at the planetary scale.

Recently formed research and science-policy platforms, such as the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), Future Earth, and the Group on Earth Observation Biodiversity Observation Network (GEOBON), aim to address the magnitude and potential effects of ongoing habitat and biodiversity transformations. Given the global scope of many NASA’s satellite products and campaigns, the CC&E community is particularly well placed, and called on, to contribute to these efforts.

I will provide a short roadmap to these international efforts and introduce particular opportunities for research integrating remote sensing, in situ data and models. I will give an overview of globally mobilized spatial biodiversity data, which - while growing - in detail and magnitude continues to fall behind remotely sensed information and its ever advancing spatial and spectral resolution. This sets up a number of research, modeling and infrastructure challenges. I will present examples of recent attempts to establish a process-based connection between remote sensing signals and biodiversity dynamics at different spatial, ecological and phylogenetic scales. I will also introduce an integrated and global environment – biodiversity data integration and modelling platform under development in Map of Life (http://mol.org/) that utilizes an array of MODIS- and Landsat based 1km resolution remote-sensing supported layers targeted for spatiotemporal monitoring and modelling of biodiversity. The newly derived layers and modelling framework enable more accurate and representative models of species occurrence and are more readily able to address the scale of processes underpinning species distributions.

Collaborative research linking among remote sensing experts, modelers, and biodiversity scientists has the potential to enable a momentous contribution of NASA to the global research and science-policy platforms aiming to support more effective management of biodiversity and natural resources.

Presentation: 2015_Apr20_AM_Jetz_17.pdf (4286k)

Presentation Type:  Plenary Talk

Session:  Theme 1: Tracking habitat change through new integrative approaches and products

Presentation Time:  Mon 10:30 AM  (18 minutes)