Translating land cover/land use classifications to habitat taxonomies for landscape monitoring: A Mediterranean assessment

Periodic monitoring of biodiversity changes at a landscape scale constitutes a key issue for conservation managers. Earth observation (EO) data offer a potential solution, through direct or indirect mapping of species or habitats. Most national and international programs rely on the use of land cover (LC) and/or land use (LU) classification systems. Yet, these are not as clearly relatable to biodiversity in comparison to habitat classifications, and provide less scope for monitoring. While a conversion from LC/LU classification to habitat classification can be of great utility, differences in definitions and criteria have so far limited the establishment of a unified approach for such translation between these two classification systems. Focusing on five Mediterranean NATURA 2000 sites, this paper considers the scope for three of the most commonly used global LC/LU taxonomies—CORINE Land Cover, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) land cover classification system (LCCS) and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme to be translated to habitat taxonomies. Through both quantitative and expert knowledge based qualitative analysis of selected taxonomies, FAO-LCCS turns out to be the best candidate to cope with the complexity of habitat description and provides a framework for EO and in situ data integration for habitat mapping, reducing uncertainties and class overlaps and bridging the gap between LC/LU and habitats domains for landscape monitoring—a major issue for conservation. This study also highlights the need to modify the FAO-LCCS hierarchical class description process to permit the addition of attributes based on class-specific expert knowledge to select multi-temporal (seasonal) EO data and improve classification. An application of LC/LU to habitat mapping is provided for a coastal Natura 2000 site with high classification accuracy as a result

An updated meta-analysis of the distribution and prevalence of Borrelia burgdorferi s.l. in ticks in Europe

We updated a previous meta-analysis of the reported prevalence of Borrelia burgdorferi s.l. (Bb) in questing nymphs of Ixodes ricinus with literature from January 2010-June 2017. This resulted in 195 new papers providing the prevalence of Bb for 926 georeferenced records. Previously obtained geo-referenced data (878 records, years 2000-2010) were appended for modelling. The complete dataset contains data from 82,004 questing nymphs, resulting in 558 records of B. afzelii, 404 of B. burgdorferi s.s. (only 80 after the year 2010), 552 of B. garinii, 78 of B. lusitaniae, 61 of B. spielmanii, and 373 of B. valaisiana. The most commonly reported species are B. afzelii, B. garinii and B. valaisiana largely overlapping across Europe and their prevalence is associated with portions of the environmental niche. Highest prevalence occurs in areas of 280º-290º (Kelvin) of mean annual temperature experiencing a small amplitude, steady spring slope, and high mean values of and a moderate spring rise of vegetation vigor. Low prevalence occurs in sites with low and a noteworthy annual amplitude of temperature and NDVI (colder areas with abrupt annual changes of vegetation). We trained a neural network for predicting occurrence and prevalence, providing a correct classification rate of 89.5%. These results confirm the association of prevalence of the three most commonly reported species of Bb in Europe to parts of the environmental niche and provides a statistically tractable framework for analyzing trends under scenarios of climate change

Satellite Earth observation data to identify anthropogenic pressures in selected protected areas

Protected areas are experiencing increased levels of human pressure. To enable appropriate conserva-tion action, it is critical to map and monitor changes in the type and extent of land cover/use and habitatclasses, which can be related to human pressures over time. Satellite Earth observation (EO) data andtechniques offer the opportunity to detect such changes. Yet association with field information and expertinterpretation by ecologists is required to interpret, qualify and link these changes to human pressure.There is thus an urgent need to harmonize the technical background of experts in the field of EO dataanalysis with the terminology of ecologists, protected area management authorities and policy makers inorder to provide meaningful, context-specific value-added EO products. This paper builds on the DPSIRframework, providing a terminology to relate the concepts of state, pressures, and drivers with the appli-cation of EO analysis. The type of pressure can be inferred through the detection of changes in state (i.e.changes in land cover and/or habitat type and/or condition). Four broad categories of changes in stateare identified, i.e. land cover/habitat conversion, land cover/habitat modification, habitat fragmentationand changes in landscape connectivity, and changes in plant community structure. These categories ofchange in state can be mapped through EO analyses, with the goal of using expert judgement to relatechanges in state to causal direct anthropogenic pressures. Drawing on expert knowledge, a set of pro-tected areas located in diverse socio-ecological contexts and subject to a variety of pressures are analysedto (a) link the four categories of changes in state of land cover/habitats to the drivers (anthropogenic pres-sure), as relevant to specific target land cover and habitat classes; (b) identify (for pressure mapping) themost appropriate spatial and temporal EO data sources as well as interpretations from ecologists andfield data useful in connection with EO data analysis. We provide detailed examples for two protectedareas, demonstrating the use of EO data for detection of land cover/habitat change, coupled with expertinterpretation to relate such change to specific anthropogenic pressures. We conclude with a discussionof the limitations and feasibility of using EO data and techniques to identify anthropogenic pressures,suggesting additional research efforts required in this direction