Remote sensing applications for monitoring habitat fragmentation
Abstract
Habitat fragmentation represents one of the most pervasive threats to biodiversity, ecosystem stability, and global environmental health. Driven primarily by human activities such as deforestation, urban expansion, agriculture, mining, and infrastructure development, fragmentation breaks large, contiguous habitats into smaller, isolated patches, thereby disrupting species interactions, reducing genetic diversity, and altering ecosystem functions. Monitoring habitat fragmentation is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable land management, yet conventional ground-based surveys are often limited in scale, accessibility, and temporal coverage. Remote sensing technologies, encompassing satellite imagery, aerial photography, LiDAR, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have revolutionized the ability to assess fragmentation across spatial and temporal scales. By integrating spectral, spatial, and temporal data, remote sensing enables the detection of land-cover change, the mapping of habitat patches, the assessment of edge effects, and the evaluation of connectivity. This explores the role of remote sensing in monitoring habitat fragmentation, highlighting its methodologies, applications, case studies, and integration with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and landscape ecology metrics. It also examines challenges such as spatial resolution, data accessibility, and interpretation complexities, while emphasizing the potential of emerging technologies like hyperspectral sensors, machine learning, and cloud-based platforms.