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Imaging from space protects natural habitats

November 06, 2003

The method for remote designing of conserved natural territories has been developed by Russian researchers from the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Faculty of Geography, Moscow State University, supported by WWF. The method was applied to the territories of the Far East, mountains of the south of Siberia, Urals and some areas of the European part of Russia.

In compliance with the Pan-European strategy, the conserved natural territories system or ecological network should consist of several elements. The most spacious and precious territories of high species diversity make the nuclei of ecological framework. There is no way to preserve them in isolation - they need to be connected with each other by "corridors" to ensure contacts and genetic exchange between the populations. And, finally, buffer zones around nuclei are intended to preserve them from the ill effect of anthropogenic surroundings.

Designing the ecological network and all the above elements requires drawing up an inventory of the territory, which is an uneasy task in enormous sparsely populated areas outside the boundaries of the European part of Russia. Can remote methods be applied in this case? Specialists in landscape geography under the guidance of Yu. G. Puzachenko tried to solve the task. They proceeded from the concept that biological diversity is tied up with variety of ecotopes. It does not always directly depend on the area of the territory; for example, in the mountains, where the zoning is vertical, species diversity per unit area is higher than that in the valley. In other words, the more complicated the relief is, the potentially richer the biological diversity is. Therefore, relief data can be a guide to single out potentially preserved territories. Such information can be obtained from topographic maps. However, the relief complexity reflects only potential variety of ecotopes, and real diversity can be assessed based on the satellite multi-channel photographs.

The 1:1,000,000 scale digitized topographic map and images of four channels of the SPOT satellite serve the source material for investigation. Proceeding from the relief structure analysis, a specially designed program helps to single out "corridors" aligned with linear components of the relief, such as river valleys, mountain ridges, etc. Corridor intersections form the nuclei of ecological framework.

Then the specialists analyze spectral density and intensity of the image. The intensity depends on the density of plants, wood species ratio, shrubs, level of moistening and other factors. As it reflects the real physical properties of ecotopes, the mosaic of intensity can be considered the index of variety of ecotopes for specific territories. For each territory the researchers calculate the index of variety and the index of originality, and then they use all these data to single out potentially preserved natural territories. However, they emphasize that the territories singled out in such a way require further on-site survey.

Having scanned the territory of Yakutia in such a way, the researchers singled out 185 regions which need conservation, the total area being equal to 338,718 square meters or 11.2% of the total area of the republic. Since biological diversity in Yakutia's territory is relatively low, it can be assumed that all plant and animal species populating Yakutia will be under protection.

Informnauka (Informscience) Agency