Monitoring of Biodiversity in the Erbil Governorate -Iraq Using Remote Sensing Data
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21271/zjhs.29.1.14Keywords:
Biodiversity monitoring, Remote sensing, Sentinel-2, MODIS, Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Net Primary Productivity (NPP), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI).Abstract
Ensuring the health and diversity of ecosystems has always been a challenge for conservationists. It takes years of direct work in the field for ecologists to gather sufficient data to reliably portray the conditions of an ecosystem. In many instances, their work produces an invaluable picture of the conditions as they are and, more importantly, the conditions that are changing over time. Yet, traditional methods of monitoring biodiversity simply cannot keep up with the demands of today's conservation imperative. They are labor-intensive, fail to produce timely results, and are in large part inaccessible to those who might use the information they produce. In much the same way, the potential of remote sensing to meet those demands remains largely untapped. This study utilizes remote sensing data to monitor biodiversity changes in the Erbil Governorate, Iraq, focusing on the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), and Net Primary Productivity (NPP) as proxies for biodiversity change. To do this, it combines data from MODIS and Sentinel-2 satellites with meteorological information to evaluate the spatial and temporal changes in vegetation that occurred during the recent recorded drought. The most dramatic improvement observed in the three key variables was with the EVI, which increased almost straight up from below EVI value of 2 in 2017 to almost 3 in 2020, as seen in the plot above, with the EVI gradient increasing around 2019.
In 2017, the median NPP values hovered approximately around 0.15 kgC/m²; however, they had clearly risen to nearly 0.25 kgC/m² by 2020. What's more, this research demonstrated a strong positive correlation between the EVI, derived from Sentinel-2 data, and NPP computed from MODIS. The correlation coefficients for these areas ranged from 0.68 to 0.74.
These results reaffirm the potent capabilities of satellite remote sensing for studying ecosystem dynamics and offer an unprecedented glimpse into the sophisticated ecological interplay of this understudied area. Biologists don't even fully understand the basic organ-level functions of this system, so knowing how a system as complex as this one work and understanding its dynamics are crucial for effective conservation and management of its constituent ecosystems.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Shwan Othman Hussein, Daban Kadhim Omar, Karzan Ahmed Abdulwahid
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