What can we learn about biodiversity with remote sensing approaches?

With the ongoing and aggravating pressures on Earth System biodiversity and its processes, there is a need to design and deliver information required for monitoring and for process understanding across scales of space and time.  Among the emerging tools to address these global information requirements, Earth Observation (EO) data has been showing growing potential to provide products to inform about biodiversity and understand its interactions with society. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the history of remote sensing biodiversity products, which sensors and data types have and are emerging, which methods and considerations are needed in terms of measurement and uncertainty, and what is fundamental and needed to link remote sensing to in situ data to answer outstanding biodiversity science questions and deliver monitoring capacity. I will focus on looking forward, by providing examples on some of the outstanding questions in terms of understanding biodiversity processes, identifying the drivers of change and the interaction between biodiversity and society, and highlight potential avenues where remote sensing may contribute.