Sentinel-1

Sentinel-1 is a satellite-borne radar system that was recently launched and showed great potential for mapping biodiversity across large areas of temperate forests in central Europe. The study compared Sentinel-1's performance to airborne laser scanning (ALS), which is currently considered the best method for measuring forest structure.

The researchers found that Sentinel-1's sensitivity to habitat structure is comparable to that of ALS. When modeling different aspects of biodiversity for twelve taxa, Sentinel-1 performed as well as ALS, with median R² values of 0.57 and 0.51, respectively, for the first non-metric multidimensional scaling axes representing assemblage composition.

Furthermore, the study validated the predictive ability of Sentinel-1 data using external data on the species composition of birds and saproxylic beetles. The authors suggest that to establish new large-scale biodiversity monitoring using remote sensing, it will be necessary to combine Sentinel-1 data with stratified and standardized local species data collection.