The Role Of Biodiversity In Climate Change Mitigation (ROBIN): Remote Sensing Contribution
Dutrieux, Loïc¹; Diaz, Pedro²; Equihua, Julian²; Espinoza, Daniel³; Gerard, France⁴; Herold, Martin¹; Herold, Martin¹; Kooistra, Lammert¹; Mücher, Sander⁵; Peña-Claros, Marielos⁶; Roerink, Gerbert⁵; Rowland, Clare⁴; Schmidt, Michael²; Parr, Terry^4
1GRS Laboratory, Wageningen University, NETHERLANDS; ²CONABIO, MEXICO; ³IBIF, BOLIVIA; ⁴CEH, UNITED KINGDOM; ⁵Alterra, NETHERLANDS; ⁶FEM, Wageningen University, NETHERLANDS

1. General description of the ROBIN project

The Role Of Biodiversity In climate change mitigatioN (ROBIN) is a collaborative project funded through the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). It will run over four years (2011-2015) and involves 12 partners from Europe and Latin America. The overall aim of the project is to provide a better understanding of the links between biodiversity, climate change mitigation, and land use in multi-functional landscapes across Meso and South America. Ultimately, such insights should provide guidance for defining climate change mitigation strategies as well as biodiversity protection measures. The project focuses on forest ecosystems in Latin America and will particularly investigate biodiversity-carbon relations along an environmental gradient and a land-use intensification gradients.

2. Remote Sensing contribution

Remote sensing techniques are an important contribution to the project as they will be used to map and monitor biodiversity and biodiversity relevant variables with a spatially continuous dimension. This objective will be achieved using different earth observation techniques and by developing innovative proxies of biodiversity. The challenge of the project is to link concepts and data-sources at multiple spatial scales, from in-situ to the whole continent, which will require a multi-scale approach for linking in-situ data with indices derived from moderate resolution EO data sources. As a consequence, spatial scaling constitutes an important bridge in the project and methods to integrate in-situ data in the calibration and validation of continental scale biodiversity indicators will be developed. In addition to this multi-scale approach, the project requires strong collaboration among disciplines, as concepts from ecology are to be included in a remote sensing as well as in a modeling framework. Expected output include remote sensing derived maps of land cover and land cover change, indicators of forest structural diversity, indicators of ecosystem resilience, and ultimately ecosystem integrity.