Synergetic use of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 for assessments of heathland conservation status

Habitat quality assessments often demand wall-to-wall information about the state of vegetation. Remote sensing can provide this information by capturing optical and structural attributes of plant communities. Although active and passive remote sensing approaches are considered as complementary techniques, they have been rarely combined for conservation mapping. Here, we combined spaceborne multispectral Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 SAR data for a remote sensing-based habitat quality assessment of dwarf shrub heathland, which was inspired by nature conservation field guidelines. Therefore, three earlier proposed quality layers representing (1) the coverage of the key dwarf shrub species, (2) stand structural diversity and (3) an index reflecting co-occurring vegetation were mapped via linking in situ data and remote sensing imagery.
These layers were combined in an RGB-representation depicting varying stand attributes, which afterwards allowed for a rule-based derivation of pixel-wise hab...