Remote sensing and GIS for habitat quality monitoring: New approaches and future research

Habitat quality is the ability of the environment to provide conditions appropriate for individual and species persistence. Measuring or monitoring habitat quality requires complex integration of many properties of the ecosystem, where traditional terrestrial data collection methods have proven extremely time-demanding. Remote sensing has known potential to map various ecosystem properties, also allowing rigorous checking of accuracy and supporting standardized processing. Our Special Issue presents examples where remote sensing has been successfully used for habitat mapping, quantification of habitat quality parameters, or multi-parameter modelling of habitat quality itself. New frontiers such as bathymetric scanning, grassland vegetation classification and operational use were explored, various new ecological verification methods were introduced and integration with ongoing habitat conservation schemes was demonstrated. These studies show that remote sensing and Geoinformation Science for habitat quality analysis have evolved from isolated experimental studies to an active field of research with a dedicated community. It is expected that these new methods will substantially contribute to biodiversity conservation worldwide. © 2015 by the authors