Biomonitoring of urban habitat quality with airborne hyperspectral observations. (R-4350)

Biomonitoring of natural vegetation allows the acquisition of well-defined samples at an affordable cost and allows determining air pollution at different time-scales. It reflects longer-term changes of environmental quality, because plant leaves accumulate pollution over months, or even years for evergreen species. Another advantage of this biomonitoring approach is the high spatial resolution that can be obtained. In the BIOHYPE project, biomonitoring is organized at three tree structural levels: (i) the sub-leaf level, (ii) the leaf level and (iii) the canopy level. An airborne hyperspectral based biomonitoring is applied to cover the goals at canopy scale. The overall research goal is to develop, test and validate a passive biomonitoring methodology based on hyperspectral observations and based on a field experimental approach which lapses over several spatial scales as well as over several tree structural and temporal levels, depending on the parameter considered. Specific goals of the project are: (i) the estimation of the spatial distribution of the overall air pollution by passive samplers and leaf magnetic properties; (ii) the investigation at sub-leaf level of the spatial distribution of chlorophyll fluorescence parameters, leaf reflectance, leaf wettability and stomatal characteristics; (iii) the investigation at leaf level of the spatial distribution of specific leaf area, specific water content, chlorophyll content, nitrogen content and chlorophyll fluorescence; (iv) the investigation at canopy level of the spatial distribution of chlorophyll fluorescence; (v) to compare and validate hyperspectral airborne measurements with ground measurements for the different species and test sites; and (vi) to describe and optimize a protocol for the estimation of urban habitat quality distribution with a high spatial resolution and based on air and groundborne hyperspectral measurements

Keywords:Field survey, Hyperspectral Remote Sensing, Passive biomonitoring, Trees, Urban environment

Disciplines:Biological sciences, Agriculture, forestry, fisheries and allied sciences

Project type:Collaboration project