Speaker
Description
Groundwater-dependent vegetation (GDV) plays a vital role in sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem services in water-limited environments. Yet its extent and distribution remain poorly mapped in the Mediterranean biome. This presentation synthesizes a stepwise progression in understanding and mapping GDV across the Mediterranean biome, integrating remote sensing predictors, botanical field indicators, species occurrence data, and machine learning.
The first step involved developing a local-scale classification framework that combined high-resolution remote sensing imagery with botanical field surveys and ecohydrological indicators. GDV was detected based on dry-season vegetation vitality and phreatophyte presence. This step established key spatial predictors and ground-truth indicators for scaling up the framework and enhanced our understanding of the ecological niche occupied by phreatophytes.
In the second step, a biome-wide GDV potential index was developed using eleven globally available geospatial layers. The index approximates the fundamental niche of phreatophytes and identifies areas with low to high suitability for GDV.
The final step integrated global species-community data from the sPlot database and GBIF with high-resolution remote sensing variables within a Random Forest model. This identified main drivers of GDV distribution and resulted in the first 30 m resolution GDV baseline map for the Mediterranean biome, representing the likely realised niche of phreatophytes. It reveals that GDV covers approximately 482,000 km² of natural vegetation with highest relative coverage in California and Chile.
Together, these studies demonstrate that combining ground-based ecological data with scalable Earth observation and modelling tools enables robust GDV detection across spatial scales. The final map provides a crucial basis for biodiversity conservation and sustainable groundwater management, and offers a transferable framework for mapping GDV in other regions.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
|---|---|
| Poster Presentation Option | Yes, I’m willing to present as a poster. |
