Earth Observation (EO) for Wetlands

Dr Sarah Johnson will undertake a placement with the Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust (LRWT), one of the UK's 47 Wildlife Trusts. LRWT are looking to improve their available information concerning habitat and land cover condition and status around their wetland reserves and managed areas to support strategic level landscape decisions and daily operational decisions.
To achieve this, Dr Johnson will work with the Trust to enable them to access Earth Observation (EO) data from the European Copernicus Sentinel satellites to develop work flows and tools which allow them to make use of this data within their own systems. By so doing, the Trust will be able to base their strategic and operational decisions both on existing ground based surveys as well as incorporating a more holistic view of the wider landscape over and around their wetland reserves and managed areas.
This approach provides many advantages for LRWT allowing them to improve their understanding of the status of complex fragmented ecosystems and sensitive habitats, as well as allowing them to respond within a short time frame to change events (e.g. short term anthropogenic changes to sensitive landscapes, or longer term issues such as loss of habitat). As a result, LRWT will be able to improve the quality and transparency of their decision making processing, both for immediate interventions and for longer term strategic activities, provide additional information to support reporting to the necessary statutory bodies and deploy their resources in the field in the most cost-effective and targeted way.
The work will additionally be supported by the Joint Nature Conversation Committee (JNCC) and will build on JNCC's existing activities in terms of making analysis ready datasets (ARD) from the Sentinel satellites more widely available to environmental actors.
The activities will be focused around two areas i) strategic planning at the Trust's Living Landscape in the Soar and Wreake flood plain in Leicestershire and ii) establishing a long term monitoring approach using Sentinel data at the LRWT nature reserve and Ramsar site at Rutland Water . The approach taken will draw significantly on an initial review of the Trust's information needs for landscape level information, undertaken at the start, to ensure that tools and workflows accurately map onto current working practices and are designed from the outset to be simple and understandable for Trust staff to use.
This placement will draw heavily on research undertaken and remote sensing skills developed during funded NERC projects where Dr Sarah Johnson was a Co-Investigator, and which involved a significant degree of processing of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data. These include use of Sentinel-2 for time series analysis of pasture lands in relation to climatic change and over-grazing carried out in (NE/P01626X/1), development of mapping persistence of flood water (under NE/N020324/1 and NE/N020316/1) using Sentinel-1, and mapping permanent water bodies from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 datasets (in NE/P01626X/1). . Dr Johnson was also previously in receipt of a NERC Knowledge Exchange fellowship (NE/M020576/1) focused on the use of Earth Observation data for agricultural applications through which she become involved with the remote sensing of soil moisture, eventually leading a UK workshop on the subject. Soil moisture is highly pertinent to these wetland environments, particularly the transition from saturated to flooded land.
The work is also draws significantly on NERC funding awarded to the wider research group to which Dr Johnson belongs, notably the BESS-EO working group, convened by Prof H. Balzter at Leicester (NE/N000307/01), which Dr Johnson was a member of. This explored in depth the potential of Earth Observation for supporting biodiversity and ecosystem service assessments and provided significant insight on the needs of biodiversity monitoring with remote sensing.