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Integrals of life: Tracking ecosystem spatial heterogeneity from space through the area under the curve of the parametric Rao’s Q index

2022; Elsevier BV; Volume: 52; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.ecocom.2023.101029

1476-9840

Elisa Thouverai, Matteo Marcantonio, Jonathan Lenoir, Mariasole Galfré, Elisa Marchetto, Giovanni Bacaro, Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, Daniele Da Re, Michele Di Musciano, Reinhard Furrer, Marco Malavasi, Vítězslav Moudrý, Jakub Nowosad, Franco Pedrotti, Raffaele Pelorosso, Giovanna Pezzi, Petra Šímová, Carlo Ricotta, Sonia Silvestri, Enrico Tordoni, Michele Torresani, Giorgio Vacchiano, Piero Zannini, Duccio Rocchini,

Species Distribution and Climate Change

Spatio-ecological heterogeneity is strongly linked to many ecological processes and functions such as plant species diversity patterns and change, metapopulation dynamics, and gene flow. Remote sensing is particularly useful for measuring spatial heterogeneity of ecosystems over wide regions with repeated measurements in space and time. Besides, developing free and open source algorithms for ecological modelling from space is vital to allow to prove workflows of analysis reproducible. From this point of view, NASA developed programs like the Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) to support the development of algorithms for exploiting spaceborne remotely sensed data to provide a relatively fast but accurate estimate of ecological properties in vast areas over time. Most of the indices to measure heterogeneity from space are point descriptors : they catch only part of the whole heterogeneity spectrum. Under the SBG umbrella, in this paper we provide a new R function part of the rasterdiv R package which allows to calculate spatio-ecological heterogeneity and its variation over time by considering all its possible facets. The new function was tested on two different case studies, on multi- and hyperspectral images, proving to be an effective tool to measure heterogeneity and detect its changes over time.