Petteri Vihervaara

How to integrate remotely sensed data and biodiversity for ecosystem assessments at landscape scale

ContextBiodiversity and ecosystem functioning underpins the delivery of all ecosystem services and should be accounted for in all decision-making related to the use of natural resources and areas. However, biodiversity and ecosystem services are often inadequately accounted for in land use management decisions.ObjectiveWe studied a boreal forest ecosystem by linking citizen-science bird data with detailed information on forest characteristics from airborne laser scanning (ALS). In this paper, we describe this method, and evaluate how similar kinds of biological data sets combined with remote sensing can be used for ecosystem assessments at landscape scale.MethodsWe analysed data for 41 boreal forest bird species and for 14 structural ALS-based forest parameters.ResultsThe results support the use of the selected method as a basis for quantifying spatially-explicit biodiversity indicators for ecosystem assessments, while suggestions for improvements are also reported. Finally, we evaluate the capacity of those indicators to describe biodiversity-ecosystem service relationships, for example with carbon trade-offs. The results showed clear distinctions between the different species as measured, for example, by above-ground forest biomass at the observation sites. We also assess how the available data sources can be developed to be compatible with the concept of essential biodiversity variables (EBV), which has been put forward as a solution to cover the most important aspects of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.ConclusionsWe suggest that EBVs should be integrated into environmental monitoring programmes in the future, and citizen science and remote sensing methods need to be an important part of them.

Corporate responsibility and systems thinking - tools for balanced risk management

Corporate responsibility amounts to taking into consideration conditions and effects that are systematically linked to corporate action. Systems thinking and its variants offer tools for understanding and managing the multitudes of conditions and effects that constitute corporate responsibility. We look first at the general tools of systems thinking, and then at a case of Finnish forest industry, and assessment of four particular systemic concepts that could be used to improve corporate environmental management: life cycle assessment, regionality, industrial ecosystem and ecosystem services. We conclude that systems thinking in one form or in another is a precondition for balanced economic, social and environmental management.

Training Area Concept in a Two-Phase Biomass Inventory Using Airborne Laser Scanning and RapidEye Satellite Data

This study evaluated the accuracy of boreal forest above-ground biomass (AGB) and volume estimates obtained using airborne laser scanning (ALS) and RapidEye data in a two-phase sampling method. Linear regression-based estimation was employed using an independent validation dataset and the performance was evaluated by assessing the bias and the root mean square error (RMSE). In the phase I, ALS data from 50 field plots were used to predict AGB and volume for the 200 surrogate plots. In the phase II, the ALS-simulated surrogate plots were used as a ground-truth to estimate AGB and volume from the RapidEye data for the study area. The resulting RapidEye models were validated against a separate set of 28 plots. The RapidEye models showed a promising accuracy with a relative RMSE of 19%–20% for both volume and AGB. The evaluated concept of biomass inventory would be useful to support future forest monitoring and decision making for sustainable use of forest resources.

ESLab application to a boreal watershed in southern Finland: preparing for a virtual research environment of ecosystem services.

Abstract We report on preparatory work to develop a virtual laboratory for ecosystem services, ESLab, and demonstrate its pilot application in southern Finland. The themes included in the pilot are related to biodiversity conservation, climate mitigation and eutrophication mitigation. ESLab is a research environment for ecosystem services (ES), which considers ES indicators at different landscape scales: habitats, catchments and municipalities and shares the results by a service that utilizes machine readable interfaces. The study area of the pilot application is situated in the boreal region of southern Finland and covers 14 municipalities and ten catchments including forested, agricultural and nature conservation areas. We present case studies including: present carbon budgets of natural ecosystems; future carbon budgets with and without the removal of harvest residues for bioenergy production; and total phosphorus and nitrogen future loads under climate and agricultural yield and price scenarios. The ESLab allows researchers to present and share the results as visual maps, statistics and graphs. Our further aim is to provide a toolbox of easily accessible virtual services for ES researchers, to illustrate the comprehensive societal consequences of multiple decisions (e.g. concerning land use, fertilisation or harvesting) in a changing environment (climate, deposition).

Spatial information in ecosystem service assessment: data applicability in the cascade model context

Spatial information and geographical information systems (GISs) are widely used in ecosystem service research, but both the information and the methods need to be properly understood in order to make coherent analyses. We discuss the practical challenges of incorporating spatial data to ecosystem service assessment in an agricultural landscape and apply the ecosystem service cascade model to put different data into context. We review the prerequisites and practices for successful ‘ecosystem service GIS’ and provide a structured view of the information and data needed in the assessment of ecosystem services at a regional scale. Due to the heterogeneity of the spatial data, the regional characteristics should be considered in environmental decision-making through ethnographic research on local expertise to make optimal choices in using spatial information.

Ecosytem Services: A Rapid Assessment Method Tested at 35 Sites of the LTER-Europe Network

Abstract The identification of parameters to monitor the ecosystem services delivered at a site is fundamental to the concept’s adoption as a useful policy instrument at local, national and international scales. In this paper we (i) describe the process of developing a rapid comprehensive ecosystem service assessment methodology and (ii) test the applicability of the protocol at 35 long-term research (LTER) sites across 14 countries in the LTER-Europe network (www.lter-europe.net) including marine, urban, agricultural, forest, desert and conservation sites. An assessment of probability of occurrence with estimated confidence score using 83 ecosystem service parameters was tested. The parameters were either specific services like food production or proxies such as human activities which were considered surrogates for cultural diversity and economic activity. This initial test of the ecosystem service parameter list revealed that the parameters tested were relatively easy to score by site managers with a high level of certainty (92% scored as either occurring or not occurring at the site with certainty of over 90%). Based on this assessment, we concluded that (i) this approach to operationalise the concept of ecosystem services is practical and applicable by many sectors of civil society as a first screen of the ecosystem services present at a site, (ii) this study has direct relevance to land management and policy decision makers as a transparent vehicle to focus testing scenarios and target data gathering, but (iii) further work beyond the scale investigated here is required to ensure global applicability.

Measuring β-diversity by remote sensing: a challenge for biodiversity monitoring

Biodiversity includes multiscalar and multitemporal structures and processes, with different levels of functional organization, from genetic to ecosystemic levels. One of the mostly used methods to infer biodiversity is based on taxonomic approaches and community ecology theories. However, gathering extensive data in the field is difficult due to logistic problems, overall when aiming at modelling biodiversity changes in space and time, which assumes statistically sound sampling schemes. In this view, airborne or satellite remote sensing allow to gather information over wide areas in a reasonable time. Most of the biodiversity maps obtained from remote sensing have been based on the inference of species richness by regression analysis. On the contrary, estimating compositional turnover (beta-diversity) might add crucial information related to relative abundance of different species instead of just richness. Presently, few studies have addressed the measurement of species compositional turnover from space. Extending on previous work, in this manuscript we propose novel techniques to measure beta-diversity from airborne or satellite remote sensing, mainly based on: i) multivariate statistical analysis, ii) the spectral species concept, iii) self-organizing feature maps, iv) multi- dimensional distance matrices, and the v) Raos Q diversity. Each of these measures allow to solve one or several issues related to turnover measurement. This manuscript is the first methodological example encompassing (and enhancing) most of the available methods for estimating beta-diversity from remotely sensed imagery and potentially relate them to species diversity in the field.

Environmental technology in the sustainable use of agricultural ecosystem services: the relevance of farmers' mental models

We assessed the roles of automated environmental monitoring technology in the sustainable use of agricultural ecosystem services in the Karjaanjoki River catchment area in Finland by examining the mental models of 39 farmers participating in an environmental monitoring platform. The monitoring data served the farmers in their decision-making and risk management, in addition to holding a potential for environmental research and monitoring. The farmers’ main interests, however, lay in finding cost-efficient agricultural practices, not in environmental monitoring or management as such. Greater familiarisation of users may enhance the usability of technology. Fundamental functional deficiencies, however, can only be remedied by further development. Participatory planning and the study of farmers’ mental models should thus be applied already in the designing stage. In future, new technologies should be integrated into farmers’ mental models, so as to facilitate, complement and correct traditional models of sustainability.

Framing a Nordic IPBES-like study

Natural resource depletion and adverse impacts from environmental degradation, including loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services and their associated knowledge, add to and exacerbate the list o ...

Correction: Rana, P., et al. Training Area Concept in a Two-Phase Biomass Inventory Using Airborne Laser Scanning and RapidEye Satellite Data. Remote Sens. 2014, 6, 285–309

Due to an oversight by the authors there is a correction necessary in this publication [1]. We would like to change the word “phase” to “step” throughout the manuscript. We apologize for any inconvenience caused to readers.[...]