Biodiversity from space: pitfalls in measuring community diversity from outside the Earth

Field based biodiversity monitoring presents a number of issues, mainly related to time and cost efficiency, beside the difficulty to guarantee a robust sampling design. In this view, remote sensing represents a powerful approach to predict species richness (alpha-diversity) and species community turnover (beta-diversity). In fact, it is expected that a higher spatial and ecological variability is related to a higher number of available niches, thus leading to a direct connection between remotely sensed heterogeneity and species diversity. Measuring ecological variability from remotely sensed images over space and time becomes crucial to gather effective indicators of biodiversity from space. However, the devil is in the detail. Once using remote sensing to predict biodiversity at different spatial scales and in different habitat types, pitfalls might arise. The aim of this talk is to ascertain potentials and pitfalls of monitoring alpha- and beta-diversity from space.