About this Research Topic

Background

Different dimensions of biodiversity are increasingly appreciated as critical for maintaining the functions of ecosystems and their services to humans. More recently, with the emergence of functional biogeography, functional diversity is of particular interest due to its strong links with ecosystem processes such as carbon, water and energy exchange, and climate mitigation. The multi-form diversity varies in space and time. Understanding this variation across scales is important for tracking the resilience of Earth’s ecosystem, and the information on the ecosystem structural features provides necessary foundations for monitoring, predicting the ecosystem functioning patterns and process of ecosystems from individual unit to its whole in a holistic manner.

In recent, the high-resolution, high-throughput, non-intrusive, and large-scale data on biodiversity monitoring and measurement are becoming a new trend toward enhancing the efficiency and coherency in ecological discovery. Still, the available multi-scale data on multi-dimensional diversity are incomplete and non-representative taxonomically, geographically and temporally. Although the studies on functional traits and their relations with function continue to grow, local observations on functional traits are limited. Recently, remote sensing has proved to be a critical technology for addressing this research gap. Air- and satellite-borne spectrometers at different levels could develop novel diversity measurements and alternatives in various ecosystems and for different kinds of communities and taxa.

Thus, our goal is to bring together the latest research in a fast-growing direction that combines remote sensing techniques and their application in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. We would like to know how the different levels of ecological theories, from species to ecosystems, are linked more coherently than ever via the multi-scale digitalized observational and computational method advances. We encourage addressing these problems by proposing new mathematical, or statistical models, in an interdisciplinary manner such as evolution, biogeography and macroecology.

We welcome Original Research or Literature Review on the following topics of interest (the list is not exhaustive):
• Large-scale diversity patterns
• The development of remote sensing techniques in monitoring functional diversity
• The relationship between diversity and ecosystem functions with remote-sensed data/models
• Scale dependency of different functional diversity measures
• Functional diversity-related conservation planning
• New analytical methods and research tools in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning measurement

Keywords: diversity, remote-sensing, patterns, biodiversity-ecosystem functioning; functional diversity

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