CARE-X Biodiversity Monitoring (DLR)

Main focus of the project is the developement of a remote sensing technology for European monitoring of NATURA 2000 areas to fulfill the obligations of the EU commission for the member states.

NATURA 2000 Monitoring
NATURA 2000 sites cover approximately seven per cent of the territory of Germany. The EU Habitats Directive (council directive 92/43/ECC) requires a standardised monitoring of the habitat types and a reporting every six years. For this reason, an operational, objective, economically priced and as far as possible automated application is required. The rapidly developing remote sensing sensor technique and also new image processing methods offer new possibilities to apply remote sensing data for NATURA 2000 monitoring. The possibilities of remote sensing techniques for detecting and monitoring of biodiversity within the scope of the Habitats Directive has already been proven by EU projects SPIN and EON 2000+. Consequently this study is a contribution to an effective implementation of these methods for operational use at the regional level (of German federal states). For this purpose methods for large-area covering classification of high temporal resolution are required.

Change Detection Analysis for Monitoring of Biodiversity
For the monitoring of biogeographic regions information about the structure and composition of the existing vegetation within a growth period are required. With temporal very high resolution (TVHR) satellite data, such as RapidEye and TerraSAR-X, the dates for a highly effective utilization of aquired images for different vegetation types and habitats can be detected.