MultiScale Biodiversity Assessment Framework Using Remote Sensing and Ecological Network Analysis for Wildlife Conservation

Abstract

The problem of biodiversity loss resulting from habitat fragmentation and changes in land use calls for a biodiversity monitoring method that works at several spatial scales rather than depending on isolated habitat measurements or individual species assessment. The MultiScale Biodiversity Assessment Framework described in this paper is a combination of remote sensing-based landscape indicators and ecological network analysis to simultaneously assess the quality of habitat, its connectivity, and species interaction resilience. The framework unifies regional-scale land-cover mapping, patch-scale fragmentation analysis, and species interaction networks in a single evaluation workflow. Vegetation and land-use indexes obtained from satellite data help identify habitat patches that are further modeled as nodes and corridors in an ecological network measuring their connectivity, centrality and resilience. The integrated framework allows detecting biodiversity-critical regions and corridors that can be overlooked when assessing only one scale. Comparison of the framework results with ecological indicators based on field data proves the ability of the framework to measure cross-scale dependencies necessary for conservation management.