A global remote sensing mission to detect and predict plant functional biodiversity change

Abstract:

Global biodiversity is one of the most crucial and least-observed dimensions of the earth system and increasingly important for anticipating changes to both the climate system and ecosystem services. Parallel developments in biodiversity science and remote sensing show that new satellite observations could directly provide global monitoring of one key dimension of global biodiversity, plant functional trait diversity. Remote sensing has already proven a pivotal aid to address the biodiversity data gap. Data on plant productivity, phenology, land-cover and other environmental parameters from MODIS and Landsat satellites currently serve as highly effective covariates for spatiotemporal biodiversity models. The growing functional trait paradigm in ecology, supported by the development of a global plant trait database that includes information for more than one-third of the global flora, highlights the importance of detecting functional diversity globally. Functional traits such as nutrient concentrations, characteristic growth forms and wood density drive both, how organisms respond to environmental change and the effects of organisms on ecosystems. Additionally, the ever more complete tree of life for plants, which presents a link to the shared evolutionary history of plant traits within lineages, coupled with advances in macroevolutionary models and data gap filling techniques, allows predictions of traits that cannot be directly observed. Using experimental manipulations of plant functional and phylogenetic diversity, our team is testing the extent to which we can link above and belowground measurements of biodiversity to remotely sensed optical diversity using hyperspectral data. These efforts will provide the means to fruitfully harness functional diversity data from space from the envisioned Global Biodiversity Observatory (GBO) mission. In turn, remotely sensed hyperspectral data from GBO will allow fundamental breakthroughs and resolve one of the most challenging aspects of Earth System science - the need to better quantify and detect change in the dynamics of functional diversity across the globe.