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Publication

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Haller, Ruedi; Hauenstein, Pius; Anderwald, Pia; Bauch, Kristina; Jurgeit, Florian; Aichhorn, Katharina; Kreiner, Daniel; Höbinger, Tamara; Lotz, A.

File (digital)

2014

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Bibliothek Verwaltung SN HT 015.1

Long-term monitoring is a key task for any national park. Therefore, a set of monitoring programs has been established by ecologists in the last decades to observe changes of different ecological processes. However, monitoring change at the landscape level has lagged behind because of the cost-intensive investments to be made and also because of the lack of a meaningful framework to detect and measure change as well as store data at this scale. Documenting change of the landscape could give insights into processes which were not expected by experts and therefore no specific monitoring system was implemented. The four national parks Berchtesgaden, Hohe Tauern, Gesause and the Swiss National Park have recently developed a framework to fill this gap in their monitoring system. Based on aerial image comparison and on a formerly defined interpretation key from the Interreg IIIB project HABITALP, the working group has developed the necessary workflow and tools. The group has also expanded the existing inventory based on aerial photographs to a change detection data set which allows quantifying change at the landscape level in the protected areas. Fields denoting change were added to the existing interpretation key and the data model from HABITALP based on two different time series of aerial photographs. Current technology allows for a comparison between the two stereoscopic images and the detection of thematic and geometric changes. The system was trialed in test areas of all four national parks. Resulting maps allow for a detailed insight into change of the main habitat types, as well as several smaller, often not immediately obvious, changes in the landscape over time.