Object-Oriented Remote Sensing Tools for Biodiversity Assessment: a European Approach

In the framework of a European Union project a method is needed that allows rapid, standardized, and comparable assessment of the recent state of biodiversity in several countries at the same time. Landscape ecological research in the last decades showed that diversity of species can be correlated to the diversity of their habitats, and that remote sensing images provide good basis for this assessment. Traditional image processing methods ordered pixels of the image into classes according to the habitat they represent. In order to calculate diversity of the habitats within a landscape however, it seems of advantage if habitats are defined as objects. Classification of these objects seems then appropriate for landscape ecological analysis. This paper presents an object-oriented assessment approach that was optimized for biodiversity studies and can be applied across several countries in different biogeographical regions.