Effective ecosystem conservation and restoration are crucial to halt global biodiversity loss and to mitigate the effects of global climate change. Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are key actors in achieving an effective conservation and restoration of ecosystems, as these multifaceted organizations work on the interface of project implementation, education, public policy …
Biodiversity loss is a critical global threat, with severe implications for ecosystems, economies, and societies. A significant portion of the world’s GDP is heavily reliant on nature and the ecosystem services it provides; this includes services like flood and storm protection, fertile soils for food, timber and materials, the maintenance of air and water quality, …
IRS4BEF seeks to optimise the integration of multi-source remote sensing imagery to quantify plant functional diversity at site scale (e.g., eddy covariance station) and assess Biodiversity-Ecosystem Function relationships. The underlying hypothesis is that missions providing spectral information of different domains could be more informative of the role of plant functional diversity on ecosystem functions than …
In situ bio-optical datasets are essential for the assessment of the uncertainties of satellite ocean colour measurements and derived products. This is especially critical in coastal waters (between 200m and 5km distance from the coastline), where land adjacency effects, complex atmospheric aerosol mixtures, high loads of optically active components in particular high concentration of chromophoric …
The main EO4Diversity objective and key innovation is to predict and monitor biodiversity in terrestrial ecosystems through the integration of state-of-the-art multi-sensor Earth Observation (EO) imagery and products with next-generation ecological models. The project addresses important biodiversity science gaps, including (i) filling data gaps in the geographic, temporal, habitat and taxonomic composition coverage from in …
The European Space Agency (ESA) activity called Biodiversity+ Precursors is acontribution to the joint EC-ESA Earth System Science Initiative launched in February 2020 to jointly advance Earth System Science and its response to the global challenges that society is facing in the onset of this century. The ESABiodiversity+ Precursors include three projects on different themes; …
Increasing pressure due to anthropogenic drivers is leading to a reduction of global biodiversity and its associated benefits at the planetary scale. In open ocean (seafloor depth greater than 200 m) the most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss is fishing and extraction of seafood, with a lesser but rapidly increasing importance of climate change, …
Increasing pressure on nature due to anthropogenic drivers is leading to a reduction of global biodiversity and its associated benefits at the planetary scale. In coastal environments, the most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss are fishing, land and sea use, climate change and pollution. These drivers have accelerated in the last 50 years, and …
High-resolution images collected over a mixed forest ecosystem with the HyPlant sensor, deployed as an airborne demonstrator of the forthcoming ESA-FLEX satellite have been exploited in this study to explore the potential of a novel metric based on far-red sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (F760) to map the functional diversity of terrestrial ecosystems. Plant functional diversity, defined …
Sen2Coral aims to develop and validate new algorithms relevant for coral reef monitoring based on Sentinel-2 observations, including benthic mapping, coral reef health and mortality as well as bathymetry. The activity will develop open source algorithms for mapping (habitat, bathymetry, and water quality) and detection change for coral reef health assessment and monitoring as well …
