Description
Feld & Vogel - Development of an interactive Application: Satellite-based Habitat Analysis for Indicator Bird Species in the agricultural Landscape - a Tool to meet the EU Biodiversity Targets in 2020.
Half of Europe’s and Germany’s land is used for agriculture and therefore the impact on biodiversity is very strong. The intensification & industrialization of agriculture practice has led to a dramatic species and biodiversity loss. EU Biodiversity target indicators also report a rapid decline of farmland birds. So actions are needed! The EU approach is the new common agricultural policy (CAP) introduced in 2014, but will it work?! Pure counting of individuals does not give the necessary clues about the cause-effect relations of agricultural practice and population trends to build the basis of decision making for conservation measures.
We want to provide the public with an interactive platform to look at the habitat quality of indicator bird species over time. Time series of habitat suitability maps can show changes in the past but also predict future development. With these interactive maps, we want to foster communication between different end users & stakeholders, such as government agencies, farmers & NGOs.
We developed a standardized automated process that enables an extensive & inexpensive analysis of the status of favourable/unfavourable habitat structure in agricultural areas for selected bird species like Whinchat (Saxicola rubetra), Skylark (Alauda arvensis), and Corn Bunting (Emberiza calandra).
This topic is available on the EOD Forum. Please feel free to use this Forum, you can comment, ask questions, etc. Our specialists responsible for the App will join in the discussion.
In detail, habitat suitability for selected bird species is analyzed with help of satellite remote sensing data. Remote sensing is a promising approach for the development of high quality, but cost-effective and comprehensive methods for landscape information. Multi-temporal satellite data will be applied for the analysis of the habitat suitability, including e.g. size and nature of the crop fields, and semi-natural habitats as well as the general land use. With species distribution data from field observation (Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring, http://www.ebcc.info/pecbm.html, data kindly made available through DDA) these landscape indicators will be implemented in the species distribution model (MaxEnt). The model predicts the occurrence probability of the species and thus the habitat suitability of the landscape.
Looking at the system architecture, the server tier contains two components, the server-side analysis application (SSAA) and the logic component. Based on remote sensing and image processing algorithms the SSAA component analyses geodata, provided by the virtual hub (VH) of Germany, bird field data as well as habitat suitability parameters and the analysis results, which are stored in the data tier. The logic component controls the communication between the client and data tier. In addition, the logic component includes an entity of the GeoServer, which provides data of the data tier via WMS and WFS to the client tier.
The VH of Germany is used to access open data, which will be visualized in the client tier and is needed to process biodiversity bird indicators in the SSAA component of the server tier.
The geoportal allows the user to search, query and filter information temporally, spatially, and content based. In addition, data can be exported, allowing a corresponding end-user processing.
The application is available at: http://185.27.157.19:7082 after setting up an account.
Users
public authorities, NGOs, farmer, general public
Domain
Biodiversity, Agriculture, Environment
Partner
Luftbild Umwelt Planung GmbH (LUP), Germany
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Helga Kuechly (helga.kuechly@lup-umwelt.de)
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Stefan Braumann (stefan.braumann@lup-umwelt.de)
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Frick Annett (annett.frick@lup-umwelt.de)
