Project Details
Projekt
Development of area-wide functional indicators using remotely sensed data
Applicant
Professor Dr. Jörg Bendix
Subject Area
Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
Term
from 2013 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 233599952
The proposal aims at the development and implementation of area-wide functional indicators (Evapotranspiration ET, Primary Production, Water Use Efficiency) which can be used to monitor changes in tree water relations due to environmental change (land use and climate change) and to identify water sensitive indicator trees. Calibration and quality assessment of the developed algorithms will be conducted among others with scintillometer and eddy covariance measurements above the canopy, and observation-based model results of project C5 and others. For the model of C5, the required tree crown illumination (sunlit and shaded fraction) will be calculated by means of LiDAR data. Furthermore, the proposal aims at deriving area-wide structural and multi-/hyperspectral predictor variables applicable to develop and implement area-wide functional indicators on biodiversity and ecosystem processes in collaboration with project C2. Among others, the variables are water stress and productivity related indices but also structural parameters as e.g. vegetation height and canopy density. The third aim is to provide other platform projects with future land use change projections based on change detection and Multi Objective Land Allocation (MOLA) techniques. Indicators and predictor variables are developed on the crown scale with high resolution data (1 - 6.5 m resolution per Pixel) and are then upscaled to the landscape scale (~30 m pixel resolution) for area-wide monitoring in southern Ecuador. The implementation in an operational monitoring system together with the non-university cooperation partners requires indicators which can be derived from operationally available data sources.
DFG Programme
Research Grants (Transfer Project)
