Harmonization of the Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) with the General Habitat Categories (GHC) classification system

Monitoring land cover and habitat change is a key issue for conservation managers because of its poten-tial negative impact on biodiversity. The Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) and the General HabitatCategories (GHC) System have been proposed by the remote sensing and ecological research community,respectively, for the classification of land covers and habitats across various scales. Linking the two sys-tems can be a major step forward towards biodiversity monitoring using remote sensing. The translationbetween the two systems has proved to be challenging, largely because of differences in definitions andrelated difficulties in creating one-to-one relationships between the two systems. This paper proposesa system of rules for linking the two systems and additionally identifies requirements for site-specificcontextual and environmental information to enable the translation. As an illustration, the LCCS clas-sification of the Le Cesine protected area in Italy is used to show rules for translating the LCCS classesto GHCs. This study demonstrates the benefits of a translation system for biodiversity monitoring usingremote sensing data but also shows that a successful translation is often depending on the degree ofecological knowledge of the habitats and its relationship with land cover and contextual information