Assessing Plant Diversity in a Dry Tropical Forest: Comparing the Utility of Landsat and Ikonos Satellite Images

While high expectations have been raised about the utility of high resolution satellite imagery for biodiversity assessment, there has been almost no empirical assessment of its use, particularly in the biodiverse tropics which represent a very challenging environment for such assessment challenge. This research evaluates the use of high spatial resolution (IKONOS) and medium spatial resolution (Landsat ETM+) satellite imagery for assessing vegetation diversity in a dry tropical forest in central India. Contrary to expectations, across multiple measures of plant distribution and diversity, the resolution of IKONOS data is too fine for the purpose of plant diversity assessment and Landsat imagery performs better.