Novel Approaches in Tropical Forests Mapping and Monitoring–Time for Operationalization

For more than three decades, the remote sensing scientific community has successfully generated predictive models of tropical forest attributes and ecological processes at leaf, canopy, patch landscape scale by linking field-measured data to remotely sensed spectral values, as well other variables derived from data. The main interest these applications is help describe functional patterns occurring larger geographic scales with sufficient accuracy precision enable scientists better understand processes, such relationship between atmospheric fluxes, plant structural ecophysiological traits, soil attributes, anthropogenic use, species occurrence animal movement. However, earth’s environment suffers ever-increasing human use abuse, detecting spatiotemporal changes in become a necessary decision-making tool conservation action natural resources’ management. Moving modeling into study soil, plants, wildlife socioecological using requires extrapolation single time-step its application on time series same expected accuracy. challenges this matter are not trivial, since moisture conditions, cloud contamination, canopy leaf-level geometry physiology can affect strength proposed models. In context, term ‘Operationalization’ refers migration but also design implementation user-friendly tools increase efficacy communicating trends users. [...]