Quantifying and valuing biodiversity is essential for effective conservation strategies and addressing and mitigating biodiversity loss. Remote sensing is increasingly recognized as a valuable tool for monitoring various aspects of plant diversity, offering a solution to the spatial and temporal limitations of traditional field sampling. In addition, remote sensing can provide colocated information regarding ecosystem functions and services, which is crucial for understanding the role of plant diversity in maintaining ecosystem stability and resilience.
Despite its potential, remote sensing still faces numerous challenges in reliably quantifying plant diversity and bridging the gap with the field of ecology. There is a need for suitable and comparable field datasets that represent terrestrial ecosystems, which remote sensing can use to develop reliable estimation methods modeling frameworks and leverage new opportunities from new remote sensing missions and their integration. At the same time, closer collaboration with ecologists is necessary to understand their needs and demands better so that remote sensing outputs are valuable for a broader scientific community.
This session calls for recent studies showing advances in this field, with the scope of attracting scientists from other disciplines, notably ecology. We welcome both specialized and multidisciplinary contributions that advance the science of remote sensing of vegetation diversity or use its products in ecological studies. The session is also open to out-of-the-box approaches and biodiversity studies over other taxa.