Item

Abstract

Recent progress in remote sensing provides much-needed, large-scale spatio-temporal
information on habitat structures important for biodiversity conservation. Here we examine
the potential of a newly launched satellite-borne radar system (Sentinel-1) to map the biodiversity
of twelve taxa across five temperate forest regions in central Europe. We show that
the sensitivity of radar to habitat structure is similar to that of airborne laser scanning (ALS),
the current gold standard in the measurement of forest structure. Our models of different
facets of biodiversity reveal that radar performs as well as ALS; median R² over twelve taxa by
ALS and radar are 0.51 and 0.57 respectively for the first non-metric multidimensional scaling
axes representing assemblage composition. We further demonstrate the promising predictive
ability of radar-derived data with external validation based on the species composition of
birds and saproxylic beetles. Establishing new area-wide biodiversity monitoring by remote
sensing will require the coupling of radar data to stratified and standardized collected local species data.