Bioscape: Combining Airborne Hyperspectral and Laser Altimeter with Field Data to Advance Remote Sensing of Biodiversity

Biodiversity loss jeopardizes human wellbeing and sustainable development and is the target of multiple global, national, and regional conservation goals advocating for increasing the integrity of all ecosystems. Quantifying ecosystem integrity can be done by examining the state and trends of biodiversity in a system. Recent advances in remote sensing capabilities offer exciting opportunities to do this, however, for these data to answer the most important ecological and evolutionary questions, they need to be integrated with traditional field-based measurements [1] .