ECOPOTENTIAL: Integration of Earth Observation in ecological modeling

Sustainable development demands for an enhanced-evidence-and science-based policy and management of the environment. The ECOPOTENTIAL way to address the issue is to improve the capability of monitoring and modelling the ecosystems and ecosystem services by starting from Protected Areas. The PAs thus act as open labs for building the necessary knowledge base to face the challenge of global change. A major asset of the ECOPOTENTIAL's approach to enhance predictive capacity of the state and temporal evolution of ecosystems is to focus on the integration of modelling techniques with EO data, both remote and in-field. The goal is to improve our knowledge on ecosystem nonlinearity, complexity and uncertainties and to predict ecosystem changes in key PAs. ECOPOTENTIAL develops and applies a range of EO-data based conceptual, correlative and process-based models on mountains, arid and coastal/ marine ecosystems and prototypes online data services for ecosystem indicators and potential supply of ecosystem services using data-assimilation. The poster showcases a few examples.