Mapping the richness and composition of British breeding birds from coarse spatial resolution satellite sensor imagery

Abstract

Remote sensing has great potential as a source of information on biodiversity over large areas. Past studies have generally focused on species richness, used aspatial statistical techniques and highlighted scale‐dependent results. Here, a fuller assessment of avian biodiversity, considering species richness and composition, was undertaken for breeding bird species in Great Britain from NDVI and temperature data derived from NOAA AVHRR imagery. Broad classes of bird species composition defined by an ordination analysis exhibited a high degree of separability, with classification accuracies (based on training data) of up to 77.3% observed. Although only 18.1% of the variance in species richness could be explained by a conventional aspatial regression analysis it was apparent from geographically weighted regression analyses that the relationship between species richness and the remotely sensed response was significantly non‐stationary. Relative to the standard regression, geographically weighted analyses yielded models that provided stronger relationships and highlighted the spatial dependence of the relationship. Marked spatial variation in the regression model parameters and explanatory power were evident within and between scales. The results indicated the ability to characterize aspects of biodiversity from coarse spatial resolution remote sensing data and highlight the need to accommodate for the effects of spatial non‐stationarity in the relationship.

Acknowledgements

The AVHRR data were extracted from the NOAA/NASA Pathfinder Land archive, produced and distributed by the GSFC DAAC, and sponsored by NASA's Mission to Planet Earth program. The GWR analyses were undertaken with the GWR2 and GWR3 packages developed at Newcastle University and the SOFM analyses with the Trajan package. I am also very grateful to the British Trust for Ornithology for allowing access to breeding bird distribution data from the 1988–1991 breeding bird atlas and the referees for their helpful comments.