Satellite Remote Sensing For Conservation Action

Explains how satellite remote sensing informs and helps deliver successful conservation management through case studies, which highlight practitioner experience.

The ability to anticipate the impacts of global environmental changes on natural resources is fundamental to designing appropriate and optimised adaptation and mitigation strategies. However, this requires the scientific community to have access to reliable, large-scale information on spatio-temporal changes in the distribution of abiotic conditions and on the distribution, structure, composition, and functioning of ecosystems. Satellite remote sensing can provide access to some of this fundamental data by offering repeatable, standardised, and verifiable information that is directly relevant to the monitoring and management of our natural capital. This book demonstrates how ecological knowledge and satellite-based information can be effectively combined to address a wide array of current natural resource management needs. By focusing on concrete applied examples in both the marine and terrestrial realms, it will help pave the way for developing enhanced levels of collaboration between the ecological and remote sensing communities, as well as shaping their future research directions. Satellite Remote Sensing and the Management of Natural Resources is primarily aimed at ecologists and remote sensing specialists, as well as policy makers and practitioners in the fields of conservation biology, biodiversity monitoring, and natural resource management.

Conservation Biology, techniques, applications.

Recently, growing interest in the use of remote sensing imagery has appeared to provide synoptic maps of water quality parameters in coastal and inner water ecosystems;, monitoring of complex land ecosystems for biodiversity conservation; precision agriculture for the management of soils, crops, and pests; urban planning; disaster monitoring, etc. However, for these maps to achieve their full potential, it is important to engage in periodic monitoring and analysis of multi-temporal changes. In this context, very high resolution (VHR) satellite-based optical, infrared, and radar imaging instruments provide reliable information to implement spatially-based conservation actions. Moreover, they enable observations of parameters of our environment at greater broader spatial and finer temporal scales than those allowed through field observation alone. In this sense, recent very high resolution satellite technologies and image processing algorithms present the opportunity to develop quantitative techniques that have the potential to improve upon traditional techniques in terms of cost, mapping fidelity, and objectivity. Typical applications include multi-temporal classification, recognition and tracking of specific patterns, multisensor data fusion, analysis of land/marine ecosystem processes and environment monitoring, etc. This book aims to collect new developments, methodologies, and applications of very high resolution satellite data for remote sensing. The works selected provide to the research community the most recent advances on all aspects of VHR satellite remote sensing.

This volume demonstrates how ecological knowledge and satellite-based information can be effectively combined to address a wide array of current natural resource management needs.

Remote sensing has been successfully applied in monitoring of protected areas around the world. With intensified impacts of climate and environmental change, protected areas become increasingly important to serve as indicators of and buffers against the impacts of the disturbances. Remote sensing plays an irreplaceable role in this frontline of challenges. The subjects and contents of the articles collected in this book reflect the state-of-the-art applications of remote sensing for capturing dynamics of environmental and ecological variations of the protected areas. The examples include revealing the level, growth rate, trend, and distribution pattern of the night-time light of global protected areas; quantifying the energy budget, water cycle, and carbon sink over the Three-River Headwaters Region in the hinterland of the Tibetan Plateau; monitoring wetland change in a cross-boundary zone between Northeast China and the Russian Far East; and monitoring applications and change analyses in protected areas of boreal forests, dryland shrubs, coastal salt marshes, large lakes, and temperate semi-humid to semi-arid transitional agricultural regions, using a variety of sensor data with innovative approaches. Also included in this collection is a bibliometric analysis that suggests the intellectual structure in remote sensing of protected areas from the perspective of journal publications.

The book will provide an overview of the practical application of remote sensing for the purposes of nature conservation as developed by ecologists in collaboration with remote sensing specialists, providing guidance on all phases from the planning of remote sensing projects for conservation to the interpretation and validation of the images.

The Cambrian radiation was the explosive evolution of marine life that started 550,000,000 years ago. It ranks as one of the most important episodes in Earth history. This key event in the history of life on our planet changed the marine biosphere and its sedimentary environment forever, requiring a complex interplay of wide-ranging biologic and nonbiologic processes. The Ecology of the Cambrian Radiation offers a comprehensive and surprising picture of the Earth at that ancient time. The book contains contributions from thirty-three authors hailing from ten countries and will be of interest to paleontologists, geologists, biologists, and other researchers interested in the global Earth-life system.