Journal
ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS
Volume 24, Issue 6, Pages 1289-1296Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1890/13-1824.1
Keywords
alpha diversity; Amazon basin; beta diversity; Bray-Curtis dissimilarity; canopy diversity; Carnegie Airborne Observatory; hyperspectral remote sensing; Shannon index; spectral species distribution
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There is a growing need for operational biodiversity mapping methods to quantify and to assess the impact of climate change, habitat alteration, and human activity on ecosystem composition and function. Here, we present an original method for the estimation of alpha- and beta-diversity of tropical forests based on high-fidelity imaging spectroscopy. We acquired imagery over high-diversity Amazonian tropical forest landscapes in Peru with the Carnegie Airborne Observatory and developed an unsupervised method to estimate the Shannon index (H') and variations in species composition using Bray-Curtis dissimilarity (BC) and nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS). An extensive field plot network was used for the validation of remotely sensed alpha- and beta-diversity. Airborne maps of H' were highly correlated with field alpha-diversity estimates (r = 0.86), and BC was estimated with demonstrable accuracy (r = 0.61-0.76). Our findings are the first direct and spatially explicit remotely sensed estimates of alpha- and beta-diversity of humid tropical forests, paving the way for new applications using airborne and space-based imaging spectroscopy.
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