Field Testing Satellite-Derived Vegetation Health Indices for a Koala Habitat Managers Toolkit

A Central Queensland University (CQU) partnership with the Queensland Government National Park management agency has developed a koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) habitat managers' toolkit for vegetation health assessment. Private and public landholders use the field-based toolkit to assess habitat suitability or monitor conservation outcomes for the koala-an iconic Australian arboreal herbivorous marsupial. The toolkit was upgraded recently with instructions to process European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-2 multispectral satellite-derived selected vegetation maps for areal vegetation health trend monitoring. A field campaign sought to validate the relatively coarse spatial resolution derived indices (photosynthetic health, leaf area index and leaf water content) to verify their suitability for the habitat management decision-support toolkit. Other user requirement-driven criteria for including remote sensing in the toolkit were imagery and associated processing software costs and ease of map production for habitat managers without cost-effective access to spatial science skills. Despite moderate-to-low field and image vegetation proxy correlations, discussing the results with stakeholders indicates that, at a landscape scale, the use of cost-free, suitable temporal resolution, 10-m spatial resolution imagery is satisfactory when aligned with the design outcomes of a habitat health toolkit.

Automated summary

A partnership between Central Queensland University and the Queensland Government National Park management agency has developed a toolkit for assessing the habitat health of koalas. The toolkit includes vegetation maps derived from satellite imagery and is designed to help landholders evaluate habitat suitability and monitor conservation outcomes. Despite some limitations, the toolkit has proven to be effective in assessing habitat health at a landscape scale.