The use of remote sensing to enhance biodiversity monitoring and detection: A critical challenge for the twenty-first century

Abstract

Improved detection and monitoring of biodiversity is critical at a time when the Earth’s biodiversity loss due to human activities is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. We face the largest loss of biodiversity in human history, a loss which has been called the “sixth mass extinction” (Leakey 1996; Kolbert 2014), given that its magnitude is in proportion to past extinction episodes in Earth history detectable from the fossil record. International efforts to conserve biodiversity (United Nations 2011) and to develop an assessment process to document changes in the status and trends of biodiversity globally through the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Díaz et al. 2015) have raised awareness about the critical need for continuous monitoring of biodiversity at multiple spatial scales across the globe. Biodiversity itself-the variation in life found among ecosystems and organisms at any level of biological organization-cannot practically be observed everywhere. However, if habitats, functional traits, trait diversity, and the spatial turnover of plant functions can be remotely sensed, the potential exists to globally inventory the diversity of habitats and traits associated with terrestrial biodiversity. To face this challenge, there have been recent calls for a global biodiversity monitoring system (Jetz et al. 2016; Proença et al. 2017; The National Academy of Sciences 2017). A central theme of this volume is that remote sensing (RS) will play a key role in such a system.