Monitoring of NATURA 2000 Areas (TU Berlin)

NATURA 2000 sites cover approximately seven per cent of the territory of Germany. The EU Habitats Directive (council directive 92/43/ECC) requires a standardized monitoring of the habitat types and a reporting every six years. For this reason, an operational, 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 presented research study aims at evaluating the use of earth-observation data of different geometric resolution (ASTER, SPOT5, Quickbird) in order to determine forest habitat types at two test sites, situated in the pre-alpine area in Bavaria (southern Germany). Therefore three modelling approaches were tested for the purpose of detecting potential habitat types. The results were subsequently compared to the terrestrial mapped habitat areas of the NATURA 2000 management plans. In the second phase of the project, a mapping and monitoring technique is developed, which covers the biogeographic scale of NATURA 2000.
For the tests, semi-automatic as well as manual classification methods were used and (if necessary) combined. Stereo-analysis or pixel-based algorithms were applied. Additionally the use of ancillary geo data, such as a DEM, the forestry site maps and soil data can increase the classification performance.

Events
Workshop in Freising at 19 July 2005.

Excursion in the Taubenberg-Area of the Association of Forest Site Ecology and Geobotany (AFSV)