mgr Łukasz Tracewski

Towards global biodiversity monitoring

In the context of expanding and intensifying human land-use, pressures on natural populations of plants and animals are ever-increasing. In particular, habitat loss and fragmentation strongly affects the viability of natural biodiversity. The United Nations Assembly declared this decade, 2011 – 2020, the Decade on Biodiversity and set a strategic plan for conservation of biodiversity: the Aichi targets. The critical aspect of meeting these goals is a global monitoring system. The potential of using remote sensing, and satellite imagery in particular, is widely recognised, although largely unfulfilled at a global scale. One of its critical missing pieces are efficient ways of measuring habitat fragmentation that take into account species home range, which is exactly what I would like to address in my research.