Analysis of Protected Areas: The Use of Satellite Images for Data Mining within ECOPOTENTIAL

Kurzfassung

The EU-funded ECOPOTENTIAL project shall demonstrate, among others, the application potential of satellite images for detailed ecological studies of environmental and ecological protected areas within pre-defined bio-geographical regions of Europe. These studies aim at the corroboration of essential variables for the monitoring of protected areas in Europe. The innovative character of our project is a systematic assessment of how to exploit SAR satellite images in combination with multispectral optical satellite images and/or local in-situ measurements. The results of the project shall demonstrate the scientific gain when combining SAR image data with optical instrument data. While standard products of Sentinel-2 and WorldView-2 provide a sound basis for multispectral analysis and interpretation of vegetated areas, any additional information contained in SAR images (of TerraSAR-X and Sentinel-1) can improve the classification results and the analysis of time series data. We estimate that about 10 essential protected area variables (out of 93 envisaged variables) can be extracted from these images.