Integrating remote sensing with ecology and evolution to advance biodiversity conservation.

Remote sensing has transformed the monitoring of life on Earth by revealing spatial and temporal dimensions of biological diversity through structural, compositional and functional measurements of ecosystems. Yet, many aspects of Earth's biodiversity are not directly quantified by reflected or emitted photons. Inclusive integration of remote sensing with field-based ecology and evolution is needed to fully understand and preserve Earth's biodiversity. In this Perspective, we argue that multiple data types are necessary for almost all draft targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity. We examine five key topics in biodiversity science that can be advanced by integrating remote sensing with in situ data collection from field sampling, experiments and laboratory studies to benefit conservation. Lowering the barriers for bringing these approaches together will require global-scale collaboration.

The geodiv r package: Tools for calculating gradient surface metrics.

The geodiv r package calculates gradient surface metrics from imagery and other gridded datasets to provide continuous measures of landscape heterogeneity for landscape pattern analysis. geodiv is the first open-source, command line toolbox for calculating many gradient surface metrics and easily integrates parallel computing for applications with large images or rasters (e.g. remotely sensed data). All functions may be applied either globally to derive a single metric for an entire image or locally to create a texture image over moving windows of a user-defined extent.We present a comprehensive description of the functions available through geodiv. A supplemental vignette provides an example application of geodiv to the fields of landscape ecology and biogeography. geodiv allows users to easily retrieve estimates of spatial heterogeneity for a variety of purposes, enhancing our understanding of how environmental structure influences ecosystem processes. The package works with any continuous imagery and may be widely applied in many fields where estimates of surface complexity are useful.

Leaf traits and canopy structure together explain canopy functional diversity: an airborne remote sensing approach.

Plant functional diversity is strongly connected to photosynthetic carbon assimilation in terrestrial ecosystems. However, many of the plant functional traits that regulate photosynthetic capacity, including foliar nitrogen concentration and leaf mass per area, vary significantly between and within plant functional types and vertically through forest canopies, resulting in considerable landscape-scale heterogeneity in three dimensions. Hyperspectral imagery has been used extensively to quantify functional traits across a range of ecosystems but is generally limited to providing information for top of canopy leaves only. On the other hand, lidar data can be used to retrieve the vertical structure of forest canopies. Because these data are rarely collected at the same time, there are unanswered questions about the effect of forest structure on the three -dimensional spatial patterns of functional traits across ecosystems. In the United States, the National Ecological Observatory Network's Airborne Observation Platform (NEON AOP) provides an opportunity to address this structure-function relationship by collecting lidar and hyperspectral data together across a variety of ecoregions. With a fusion of hyperspectral and lidar data from the NEON AOP and field-collected foliar trait data, we assessed the impacts of forest structure on spatial patterns of N. In addition, we examine the influence of abiotic gradients and management regimes on top-of-canopy percent N and total canopy N (i.e., the total amount of N [g/m2 ] within a forest canopy) at a NEON site consisting of a mosaic of open longleaf pine and dense broadleaf deciduous forests. Our resulting maps suggest that, in contrast to top of canopy values, total canopy N variation is dampened across this landscape resulting in relatively homogeneous spatial patterns. At the same time, we found that leaf functional diversity and canopy structural diversity showed distinct dendritic patterns related to the spatial distribution of plant functional types.

Challenging a Global Land Surface Model in a Local Socio-Environmental System.

Land surface models (LSMs) predict how terrestrial fluxes of carbon, water, and energy change with abiotic drivers to inform the other components of Earth system models. Here, we focus on a single human-dominated watershed in southwestern Michigan, USA. We compare multiple processes in a commonly used LSM, the Community Land Model (CLM), to observational data at the single grid cell scale. For model inputs, we show correlations (Pearson's R) ranging from 0.46 to 0.81 for annual temperature and precipitation, but a substantial mismatch between land cover distributions and their changes over time, with CLM correctly representing total agricultural area, but assuming large areas of natural grasslands where forests grow in reality. For CLM processes (outputs), seasonal changes in leaf area index (LAI; phenology) do not track satellite estimates well, and peak LAI in CLM is nearly double the satellite record (5.1 versus 2.8). Estimates of greenness and productivity, however, are more similar between CLM and observations. Summer soil moisture tracks in timing but not magnitude. Land surface reflectance (albedo) shows significant positive correlations in the winter, but not in the summer. Looking forward, key areas for model improvement include land cover distribution estimates, phenology algorithms, summertime radiative transfer modelling, and plant stress responses.

Environmental and community controls on plant canopy chemistry in a Mediterranean-type ecosystem.

Understanding how and why plant communities vary across space has long been a goal of ecology, yet parsing the relative importance of different influences has remained a challenge. Species-specific models are not generalizable, whereas broad plant functional type models lack important detail. Here we consider plant trait patterns at the local scale and ask whether plant chemical traits are more closely linked to environmental gradients or to changes in species composition. We used the visible-to-shortwave infrared (VSWIR) spectrometer of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory to develop maps of four plant chemical traits--leaf nitrogen per mass, leaf carbon per mass, leaf water concentration, and canopy water content--across a diverse Mediterranean-type ecosystem (Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, CA). For all four traits, plant community alone was the strongest predictor of trait variation (explaining 46-61% of the heterogeneity), whereas environmental gradients accounted for just one fourth of the variation in the traits. This result emphasizes the critical role that species composition plays in mediating nutrient and carbon cycling within and among different communities. Environmental filtering and limits to similarity can act strongly, simultaneously, in a spatially heterogeneous environment, but the local-scale environmental gradients alone cannot account for the variation across this landscape.

Environmental filtering and land-use history drive patterns in biomass accumulation in a mediterranean-type landscape.

Aboveground biomass (AGB) reflects multiple and often undetermined ecological and land-use processes, yet detailed landscape-level studies of AGB are uncommon due to the difficulty in making consistent measurements at ecologically relevant scales. Working in a protected mediterranean-type landscape (Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, California, USA), we combined field measurements with remotely sensed data from the Carnegie Airborne Observatory's light detection and ranging (lidar) system to create a detailed AGB map. We then developed a predictive model using a maximum of 56 explanatory variables derived from geologic and historic-ownership maps, a digital elevation model, and geographic coordinates to evaluate possible controls over currently observed AGB patterns. We tested both ordinary least-squares regression (OLS) and autoregressive approaches. OLS explained 44% of the variation in AGB, and simultaneous autoregression with a 100-m neighborhood improved the fit to an r2 = 0.72, while reducing the number of significant predictor variables from 27 variables in the OLS model to 11 variables in the autoregressive model. We also compared the results from these approaches to a more typical field-derived data set; we randomly sampled 5% of the data 1000 times and used the same OLS approach each time. Environmental filters including incident solar radiation, substrate type, and topographic position were significant predictors of AGB in all models. Past ownership was a minor but significant predictor, despite the long history of conservation at the site. The weak predictive power of these environmental variables, and the significant improvement when spatial autocorrelation was incorporated, highlight the importance of land-use history, disturbance regime, and population dynamics as controllers of AGB.