Remote sensing to support nature policies in practice
You will focus on the Drentsche Aa national park, the best monitored nature area in the Netherlands. Large parts of the nature reserve are the result of nature restoration. Marginal agricultural fields were bought by a nature management organisation and based on ecological insights, hydrology and soil properties were restored. There are field observations and vegetation maps available that can be used as ground truth. But of course you need to understand how your ground truth looks like in reality and how such data is collected. So you will visit the nature reserve and see for yourself how it works.
Amazingly, the Dutch nature conservation monitoring system makes very little use of remote sensing. Measurements or estimations of vegetation or abiotic variables to support nature conservation policy are fully based on field assessments; point observations with a low temporal frequency of assessment. Marcelle Lock is a PhD student at ITC and at the Macquarie University in Sydney and she analyses the link between information that can be derived from satellite- or aerial-based scanners and the information requirements for biodiversity monitoring and reporting. You can link up with this research.
You will build a showcase illustrating that remote sensing-based assessments have much to add for Dutch nature conservation policy. You have a lot of freedom in formulating research questions based on “need to know” from a nature policy perspective. There are many possibilities. You could e.g. look at to what extent sentinel 1 (radar) time series provides information on seasonal variation in soil moisture (an important variable in wet grassland ecosystems). Other ideas could involve combining aerial imagery from drones with Terrestrial Laser Scanning to test to what extent this can provide accurate information on structural variables like vegetation height. This approach is not yet tested well enough for grassland vegetation.
The objective of the study is to build a scientifically sound showcase of a remote-sensing based nature monitoring method.