Abstract
Assessment of the health of landscapes, by monitoring their condition over space and time, is needed to better understand the processes for sustaining or, in many cases, repairing them. Remote sensing is a tool that can efficiently identify and assess areas of landscape damage at different scales and help land managers solve specific problems. Remote sensing may appear to be a panacea for all monitoring situations but sometimes the information it provides is not enough by itself. In this paper we give examples of both scenarios—when remote sensing alone is adequate and when it is not. When remotely sensed data alone is not sufficient, monitoring problems can be solved by incorporating additional finer scale data. We use a five-step procedure based on scaling to help land managers answer the question: when is remote sensing data alone not sufficient to underpin the information needs required to achieve a specific management goal?
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ash A (2004) Dynamics of the grass layer. In: McCullough M, Musso B (eds) Healthy rangelands: principles for sustainable systems—focus on Australia’s Burdekin rangelands. Tropical Savannas Cooperative Research Centre. Charles Darwin University Darwin, Australia, pp 69–95
Bartley R, Roth CH, Ludwig JA, McJannet D, Liedloff A, Corfield J, Hawdon A, Abbott B (2006) Runoff and erosion from Australia’s tropical semi-arid rangelands: influence of ground cover for differing space and time scales. Hydrol Processes (in press)
Bastin GN, ACRIS Management Committee members (2005) Australian Collaborative Rangeland Information System, Reporting Change in the Rangelands: National Synthesis of Reports from Pilot Regions. Report to the Australian Collaborative Rangeland Information System (ACRIS) Management Committee, prepared by CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Alice Springs, Australia
Bastin GN, Ludwig JA (2006) Problems and prospects for mapping vegetation condition in Australia’s arid rangelands. Ecol Manage Restor 7:S71–S74
Brooker LC (2002) The application of focal species knowledge to landscape design in agricultural lands using the ecological neighbourhood as a template. Landsc Urban Plan 60:185–210
Caccetta PA, Allen A, Watson I (2000) The Land Monitor Project. In: Proceedings of 10th Australasian Remote Sensing & Photogrammetry Conference, August 2000, Adelaide, Australia, pp 97–107
Gunderson LH, Holling CS (eds) (2002) Panarchy: understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press, Washington DC, USA
Hobbs RJ, Hopkins AJM (1990) From frontier to fragments: European impact on Australia’s vegetation. In: Saunders DA, Hopkins AJM, How RA (eds) Australian ecosystems: 200 years of utilization, degradation and reconstruction. Surrey Beatty & Sons, Sydney, Australia, pp 93–114
Lambeck RJ (1999) Landscape planning for biodiversity conservation in agricultural regions: a case study from the wheatbelt of Western Australia. Biodiversity Technical Paper No. 2, Department of the Environment and Hertiage, Canberra, Australia. URL: http://www.deh.gov.au/biodiversity/publications/technical/landscape/exec-summary.html
Lambeck RJ, Wallace JF (1993) Assessment of the conservation value of remnant native vegetation in the central wheatbelt of Western Australia using Landsat TM imagery. Report to the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service, prepared by CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Perth, Australia
Ludwig JA, Bastin GN, Chewings VH, Eager RW, Liedloff AC (2006) Leakiness: a new index for monitoring the health of arid and semiarid landscapes using remotely sensed vegetation cover and elevation data. Ecol Indic (in press)
Ludwig JA, Stafford Smith MD (2005) Interpreting and correcting cross-scale mismatches in resilience analysis: a procedure and examples from Australia’s rangelands. Ecol Soc 10(2):20. URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol10/iss2/art20
McVicar TR, Briggs PR, King EA, Raupach MR (2003) A review of predictive modelling from a natural resource management perspective: the role of remote sensing of the terrestrial environment. A report to the Bureau of Rural Sciences, published by CSIRO Land and Water and the CSIRO Earth Observation Centre, Canberra, Australia. URL: http://www.clw.csiro.au/publications/consultancy/2003/Review_Of_Remote_Sensing.pdf
McVicar TR, Davies PJ, Qinke Y, Zhang G (2002) An introduction to temporal-geographic information systems (TGIS) for assessing, monitoring and modelling regional water and soil processes. In: McVicar TR, Rui L, Walker J, Fitzpatrick RW, Changming L (eds) Regional water and soil assessment for managing sustainable agriculture in China and Australia. ACIAR Monograph 84, Australian Center for International Agricultural Research, Canberra, Australia, pp 205–223. URL: http://www.eoc.csiro.au/aciar/book/PDF/Monograph_84_Chapter_16.pdf
McVicar TR, Jupp DLB (1998) The current and potential operational uses of remote sensing to aid decisions on drought exceptional circumstances in Australia: a review. Agric Syst 57:399–468
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. (2003) Ecosystems and human well-being: a framework for assessment report of the conceptual framework working group of the millennium ecosystems assessment. Island Press, Washington DC, USA
Patil GP (2002) Overview: landscape health assessment. In: Rapport DJ, Lasley WL, Rolston DE, Nielsen NO, Qualset CO, Damania AB (eds) Managing for healthy ecosystems. Lewis Publishers, CRC Press, Boca Raton, USA, pp 559–566
Prince SD (2002) Spatial and temporal scales for detection of desertification. In: Reynolds JF, Stafford Smith DM (eds) Global desertification: do humans cause deserts? Dahlem University Press, Berlin, Germany, pp 23–40
Pringle HJR, Watson IW, Tinley KL (2006) Landscape improvement, or ongoing degradation—reconciling apparent contradiction from the arid rangelands of Western Australia. Landsc Ecol 21 (in press)
Ryan P (2004) Balancing the scales. Ecol Manage Restor 5:85–86
Saunders DA, Arnold GW, Burbidge AA, Hopkins AJM (1987) Nature conservation: the role of remnants of native vegetation. Surrey Beatty & Sons, Sydney, Australia
Saunders DA, Hobbs RJ, Margules CR (1991) Biological consequences of ecosystem fragmentation: a review. Conserv Biol 5:18–32
Stafford Smith DM, Morton SR, Ash AJ (2000) Towards sustainable pastoralism in Australia’s rangelands. Aust J Environ Manage 7:190–203
Tongway DJ, Hindley NL (2004) Landscape function analysis manual: procedures for monitoring and assessing landscapes with special reference to minesites and rangelands. Version 3.1 on CD Produced by CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia
Wallace JF, Behn G, Furby S (2006) Vegetation condition assessment and monitoring from sequences of satellite imagery. Ecol Manage Restor 7:S31–S36
Wallace JF, Caccetta PA, Kiiveri HT (2004) Recent developments in analysis of spatial and temporal data for landscape qualities and monitoring. Aust Ecol 29:100–107
Wallace JF, Campbell N (1998) Evaluation of the feasibility of remote sensing for monitoring national state of the environment indicators. State of the Environment Technical Paper Series (Environmental Indicators), Department of the Environment, Canberra, Australia. URL: http://www.deh.gov.au/soe/techpapers/series1/remote.html
Wessman CA, Bateson CA (2006) Building up with a top–down approach: the role of remote sensing in deciphering functional and structural diversity. In: Wu J, Jones KB, Li H, Loucks OL (eds) Scaling and uncertainty analysis in ecology: methods and applications. Springer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp 147–163
White DH (2000) Implementing drought policy in Australia. Agric Sci 13:27–32
Wiens JA (1989) Spatial scaling in ecology. Funct Ecol 3:385–397
Woinarski JCZ, Fisher A (2003) Conservation and the maintenaince of biodiversity in the rangelands. Rangeland J 25:157–171
Woodcock CE, Strahler AH (1987) The factor of scale in remote sensing. Remote Sens Environ 21:311–332
Wu J (1999) Hierarchy and scaling: extrapolating information along a scaling ladder. Can J Remote Sens 25:367–380
Wu J, Li H (2006) Concepts of scale and scaling. In: Wu J, Jones KB, Li H, Loucks OL (eds) Scaling and uncertainty analysis in ecology: methods and applications. Springer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp 3–15
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge support from CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystem’s Scaling our Science initiative and CSIRO’s Water for Healthy Country Flagship Program. We also appreciate the suggestions of reviewers which improved the paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ludwig, J.A., Bastin, G.N., Wallace, J.F. et al. Assessing landscape health by scaling with remote sensing: when is it not enough?. Landscape Ecol 22, 163–169 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-006-9038-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-006-9038-6