Instrumentation and remote sensing

Description of the key activities related to the station network

Meteorological and pedological parameters are among the main factors of organismic diversity and functionality of ecosystem cycles. A systematic and large-scale measurement and recording of these environmental parameters is performed in all exploratories with more than 300 measurement stations.

Climate stations

At each of the three exploratories, 100 climate stations have been installed on grassland research plots and inside the forests. Regarding the huge amount of stations, not all stations have been equipped in an equal manner but a gradual setup has been used. As of today, the following stations are operational:

• 279 Core Environmental Monitoring Units (CEMUs))
• 21 Enhanced CEMUs (EEMUs)

CEMU – this is the basic setup which is installed on all experimental plots on grassland and forest locations. Each CEMU measures air temperature and humidity (+200 cm), soil surface temperature (+10 cm), soil moisture (-10 cm, at VIP’s  additional -20 cm) and soil temperature (-5 cm, -10 cm, -20 cm, -50 cm) in intervals between 30 minutes and 1 hour.

EEMU – on 21 selected locations, the basic CEMU setup is extended by four component radiation balance, photosynthetic active radiation, wind speed and direction as well as precipitation sensor with a recording interval of 10 minutes. Some locations are also recording barometric pressure.
A visualization of the air temperature recordings can be found: hier

Observation towers

At the biosphere reserves Schorfheide-Chorin and Schwäbische Alb, two observation towers with a height of 37 m and 44 m respectively have been installed. Air temperature and humidity profiles, as well photosynthetic active radiation profiles are recorded in addition to precipitation and the above canopy radiation budget and wind dynamics.
2 more towers, installed by the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry, can be used in the Hainich National Park.

Data handling and processing

The station network records about 45.000 values per day within each exploratory. The data stream is transmitted to Marburg for the pre-processing and quality checks and uploaded to the BExIS data base afterwards. Because of the increasing amount of data, a new climate database component has been developed which will be implemented into BExIS soon.

Description of the key activities related to Remote Sensing

Background

In reaction to the increasing demand for remote sensing products and services from different research groups, the core project “Instrumentation” was extended by a remote sensing component in the current project phase and is now named “Instrumentation and Remote Sensing”. With the extended core project, a better coordination of the remote sensing activities within the Biodiversity Exploratories is envisaged. The remote sensing sub-project will provide area wide information on the land cover and land use of the three exploratories which will complete the meteorological data collected by the instrumentation project. By providing and updating different maps derived from remote sensing data we want to enable also ‘non-remote sensing experts’ to integrate spatial and temporal components into their analysis to gain knowledge on functional biodiversity relationships at different scales.

Sensors

To cope with the manifold research questions and methods of the Biodiversity Exploratories, remote sensing data from a wide range of sensors will be acquired and pre-processed. This includes high resolution optical satellite data (e.g. Pléiades, RapidEye) as well as airborne hyperspectral and LiDAR sensors as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Overview of the remote sensing products that will be used in the 4th phase of the Biodiversity Exploratories (2014-2017)

Activities

Neighborhood analysis (land use and land cover mapping)
Ecosystem processes influencing the biodiversity are present at very different scales. It is hypothesized that several of the processes described for the intensively monitored EP’s and VIP’s are also influenced by the plot surroundings. In this work package, maps that describe the current land cover and land use of the Biodiversity Exploratories will be created. By that we wish to link the intensive observations of the EP’s and VIP’s to the larger landscape context.
The land cover classification key will be adapted to the ecosystem type. In forests, various tree species groups will be differentiated. For grasslands, agricultural land uses and shrubs will be the guiding factors for classification.