The opportunities and constraints in using cost-effective satellite remote sensing for biodiversity monitoring

In February 2004 the 7th Conference of the parties for the Convention on Biological Diversify recommended the implementation of a set of indicators to measure progress towards the 2010 and 2025 target of significantly reducing the loss of terrestrial and marine biological diversity. Collaboration between local, national and international networks is now currently being formed to measure these indicators and the resulting success of investing conservation practices into threatened areas. By measuring changing levels in the status of biodiversity, at interrelated ecological scales, the conservation community can better evaluate the success of conservation action. Analogous to the terrestrial system we hypothesise that satellite remote sensing instruments are potentially very useful tools for detecting change in the distribution of key coastal habitats and thus can be applied to monitor the spatial degradation of coral reefs, sea grass beds, mangroves and kelp forests. Using cost-effective platforms accompanied by supervised classification and images processing tools, we believe that there is an opportunity to utilise these systems to measure the status of marine habitats on a national, regional and global scale of effort. Remote sensing tools will continue to increase in accuracy, decrease in cost and become more accessible to the conservation community. As this happens the opportunity' to overlay global habitat survey images in a time series manner will become greater.