Earth from above: unravelling hidden diversity by the rasterdiv R package

Abstract:

Biodiversity is a fundamental property of ecosystem functioning. One of the mostly used methods to infer biodiversity is to rely on field data on plant or animal communities. In some cases, this might hamper a global cover of data especially when dealing with multitemporal monitoring. From this point of view, satellite remote sensing might represent a powerful tool for inferring diversity change in space and time over wide geographical regions. This is especislly true once satellite inagery is empowered by free and open source algorithms which guarantee a high robustness and reproducibility of the proposed methids. In this study I will present the newly developed rasterdiv package for R which allows to calculate different measures of diversity from satellite images.