Multi-faceted habitat connectivity: how to orchestrate remote sensing with citizen science data?

In the era of declining biodiversity, global climate change and transformations in land use, terrestrial habitat connectivity is one of the key parameters of ecosystem management. In this regard, the land-use/land-cover (LULC) dynamics is crucial to detect the spatiotemporal trends in connectivity of focal endangered species and to predict the effects for biodiversity for planned or proposed LULC changes.

Apart from the LULC derivatives of remote sensing, connectivity analysis and scenarios modelling can also benefit from citizen science datasets, such as Open Street Map and GBIF species occurrence data cubes in which aggregated data can be perceived as a cube with three dimensions - taxonomic, temporal and geographic. The synthetic LULC datasets which cover Catalonia every 5 years (1987-2022) were enriched via developed Data4Land harmonisation tool harnessing Open Street Map (through Overpass Turbo API) and World Database on Protected Areas. Two outstanding well-known tools, Graphab and MiraMon GIS&RS (using the Terrestrial Connectivity Index Module - ICT), were used to create the overarching dataset on terrestrial habitat connectivity in Catalonia (2012-2022) for target species and broad land cover categories, forests. Significant decline trends in forest habitat connectivity are observed for Barcelona metropolitan area, and vice versa in the Pyrenees mountain corridor and protected areas. According to the local case study on the connectivity of Mediterranean turtle in the Albera Natural Park, general positive trend was affected by massive fires in 2012.

To ensure the replicable results, the pipeline to create reliable metadata in accordance with FAIR principles, especially data lineage, is being developed, as well as the high performance computing pipeline for Graphab.