Sentinel-2 time series analysis for monitoring multi-taxon biodiversity in mountain beech forests
- Author:
- Parisi F., Vangi E., Francini S., D’Amico G., Chirici G., Marchetti M., Lombardi F., Travaglini D., Ravera S., De Santis E. & Tognetti R.
- Year:
- 2023
- Journal:
- Frontiers in Forests and Global Change
- Pages:
- 6: 1020477 [16 p.]
- Url:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2023.1020477
Biodiversity monitoring represents a major challenge to supporting proper forest
ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. The latter is indeed
shifting in recent years from single-species to multi-taxon approaches. However,
multi-taxonomic studies are quite rare due to the effort required for performing
field surveys. In this context, remote sensing is a powerful tool, continuously
providing consistent and open access data at a different range of spatial and
temporal scales. In particular, the Sentinel-2 (S2) mission has great potential to
produce reliable proxies for biological diversity. In beech forests of two Italian
National Parks, we sampled the beetle fauna, breeding birds, and epiphytic
lichens. First, we calculated Shannon’s entropy and Simpson’s diversity. Then, to
produce variables for biodiversity assessment, we exploited S2 data acquired in
the 4 years 2017–2021. S2 images were used to construct spectral bands and
photosynthetic indices time series, from which 91 harmonic metrics were derived.
For each taxon and multi-taxon community, we assessed the correlation with
S2 harmonic metrics, biodiversity indices, and forest structural variables. Then,
to assess the potential of the harmonic metrics in predicting species diversity
in terms of Shannon’s and Simpson’s biodiversity indices, we also fit a random
forests model between each diversity index and the best 10 harmonic metrics
(in terms of absolute correlation, that is, the magnitude of the correlation) for
each taxon. The models’ performance was evaluated via the relative root mean
squared error (RMSE%). Overall, 241 beetle, 27 bird, and 59 lichen species were
recorded. The diversity indices were higher for the multi-taxon community than
for the single taxa. They were generally higher in the CVDA site than in GSML,
except for the bird community. The highest correlation values between S2 data
and biodiversity indices were recorded in CVDA for multi-taxon and beetle
communities (| r| = 0.52 and 0.38, respectively), and in GSML for lichen and
beetle communities (| r| = 0.34 and 0.26, respectively). RMSE% ranged between
2.53 and 9.99, and between 8.1 and 16.8 for the Simpson and Shannon index, respectively.
The most important variables are phase and RMSE of red-Edge bands
for bird and lichen communities, while RMSE and time of tassel cap and from
EVI indices for beetles and multi-taxon diversity. Our results demonstrate that
S2 data can be used for identifying potential biodiversity hotspots, showing that
the herein presented harmonic metrics are informative for several taxa inhabiting
wood, giving concrete support to cost-effective biodiversity monitoring and
nature-based forest management in complex mountain systems.
Keywords: ecological indicators, forest structure, mountain forests, species diversity, remote
sensing.
- Id:
- 35154
- Submitter:
- zpalice
- Post_time:
- Wednesday, 22 February 2023 00:50