By Chen Zhu & Wande Li in the Thousand Island Lake Biodiversity monitoring is the process of determining status and tracking changes in living organisms. Effective biodiversity monitoring needs a reliable tool in the field. When we go into the forest, many ecological processes (e.g., animal-mediated seed dispersal) are occurring above us because there are…
By Aurélie Shapiro – Senior Remote Sensing Specialist, WWF-Germany Accompanying the article: “Cloud-native Seascape Mapping of Mozambique’s Quirimbas National Park with Sentinel-2” The coral reefs and associated seascapes of norther Mozambique are some of the most resilient, intact in the world, part of a global portfolio of 50 important reefs. Alas, in the time of…
by Dan Stowell, Queen Mary University of London, UK & Jérôme Sueur, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France Can monitoring sounds help us to meet the world’s biodiversity targets? Nature sound recordings have been collected for over a hundred years, with an exponential increase since the 1950s. Most such recordings were taken…
by Sophia L. Ellis Accompanying the paper: Influence of altitude on tropical marine habitat classification using imagery from fixed‐wing, water‐landing UAV s Tropical marine habitats within a seascape form some of the most productive ecosystems in the coastal zone. They provide important ecosystem services and are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Fine-scale monitoring of these…
By Hannah White This blog accompanies the paper: Quantifying large‐scale ecosystem stability with remote sensing data. Read the full paper here We want ecosystems to function. On top of that, we want them to maintain their functioning at a predictable, consistent level. In the face of global change, however, this may be problematic. We need…
By Francisco Javier Ancin-Murguzur This blog accompanies the paper: Drones as a tool to monitor human impacts and vegetation changes in parks and protected areas. Read the full paper here Monitoring trails is an essential part of the conservation work in protected areas to assess how visitors affect the trails and their surroundings. When we…
By Tim O’Brien This blog is an accompaniment to the paper: Camera trapping reveals trends in forest duiker populations in African National Parks. Read the full paper here Presence-absence surveys (more properly detection-nondetection surveys) and occupancy surveys, are often used as indicators of the health of wildlife population. Occupancy surveys use a replicated sampling design where…
by Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research Species are often involved in complex interactions with other species, which can affect their occurrence, abundance, feeding habits and disease transmission. Observing and studying species interactions can be difficult. To circumvent this problem, ecologists increasingly rely on remote devices such as camera traps. In a recent study…
Rasmus Erlandsson Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, Sweden Some ideas stick in your mind until you do something about them, and in 2011 an idea popped up in my head when I was chatting with a friend on the metro on my way home from university: Are colour infrared aerial photos, one of the…
Merry Crowson Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, UK “The world is one big data problem.” (Andrew McAfee) There is a lot of excitement in the scientific community surrounding the potential of big data – that is, the recent exponential increase in the amount and variety of data, as well as the…
Julie A. Fortin School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Beginning over a hundred years ago, the Canadian government hired land surveyors to map out the mountains of western Canada. These surveyors used unique photo-topographic methods to create topographic maps . As a byproduct of their work, there are…
