By Vienna Saccomanno, The Nature Conservancy. In partnership with: The University of California, Los Angeles, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Greater Farallones Association, Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, Hog Island Oyster Co., and California State University Monterey Bay. Kelp forests are found along one-quarter of the planet’s coastlines and are critical to maintaining the diversity and resilience of local marine life. Kelp forests, such as the ones that historically dominated the North Coast of California USA, provide habitat and nursery grounds for hundreds of species ..read more

By Ines Standfuß, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt Animal habitats are not only subject to alterations by regular phenomena like seasonal variations, but are increasingly exposed to human intervention. The most prominent example is likely human-induced climate change that is modifying environmental conditions worldwide. In addition to climate change, which affects entire regions mainly in the medium and long term, human activities can have an immediate impact on the small-scale landscape mosaic. The direct alteration of habitat patches through agricultural management is an example of ..read more

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 many animals living in the arboreal habitats. However, it’s not easy to find them and know what they’re doing. Arboreal camera trapping provides us an avenue to record arboreal animals and track their activities. Fleshy fruits are very at ..read more

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 pandemics and instability and insecurity, remote sensing-based monitoring plays a more important role than ever. Image by Aurélie Shapiro/ WWF In this latest publication, WWF-Germany’s Space+Science team and WWF-Mozambique, in colla ..read more

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 in order to describe and decipher animal communication. However the sounds of animals reveal more than behaviour: they also reflect the structure and functioning of the ecosystem of which the animals are a part. The practice of d ..read more

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 ecosystems, in order to assess their status and quantify changes in spatial extent, is achieved through marine spatial planning. Habitat maps made available through remote sensing technology provide critical in ..read more

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 tools to be able to measure how stable ecosystems are, particularly as the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events is set to increase, so that systems are able to work in a predictable way that is beneficial to both people and nature. Much of the ..read more

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 think of “leave no trace”, we think of people picking up their garbage and sticking to the trails: what we often forget is that even when we are respectful with nature, we do affect the trails and their surroundings just by walking on them. When we walk on ..read more

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 sampling units are surveyed > 2 times, allowing estimation of the probability that a sampling unit is occupied, and provides unbiased estimated of occupancy and use. If we include features of the sampli ..read more

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 carried out by researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo- and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in Germany and University of California, Davis, USA, the scientists explored to what extent camera trap data are su ..read more