Feeling the rhytm of Nature: challenges and prospects of biodiversity prediction from space

The assessment of species diversity in relatively large areas has always been a challenging task for ecologists, mainly because of the intrinsic difficulty to judge the completeness of species lists and to undertake sufficient and appropriate sampling. Since the variability of remotely sensed signal is expected to be related to landscape diversity, it could be used as a good proxy of diversity at species level. It has been demonstrated that the relation between species and landscape diversity measured from remotely sensed data varies with scale. In this talk, I aim at providing a theoretical and emipircal background of the mostly used diversity indices stemmed from information theory that are commonly applied to quantify landscape diversity from remotely sensed data.