Comparing global Sentinel-2 land cover maps for regional species
distribution modelling
Abstract
Mapping the spatial and temporal dynamics of species distributions is
necessary for biodiversity conservation land-use planning decisions.
Recent advances in remote sensing and machine learning have allowed for
high resolution species distribution modelling that can inform
landscape-level decision making. Here we compare the performance of
three popular Sentinel-2 (10m) land cover maps including Dynamic World
(DW), European land cover (ELC10) and World Cover (WC), in predicting
wild bee species richness over southern Norway. The proportion of
grassland habitat within 250m (derived from the land cover maps), along
with temperature and distance to sandy soils, were used as predictors in
both Bayesian Regularized Neural Network and Random Forest models.
Models using grassland habitat from DW performed best (RMSE = 2.85;
averaged across models), followed by WC (RMSE = 2.86) and ELC10 (RMSE =
2.89). All satellite-derived maps outperformed a manually mapped
Norwegian land cover dataset called AR5 (RMSE = 3.02). When validating
the model predictions of bee species richness against citizen science
data on solitary bee occurrences using generalized linear models, we
found that ELC10 performed best (AIC = 2800), followed by WC (AIC =
2939), and DW (AIC = 2973). While the differences in RMSE we observed
between models were small, they may be significant when such models are
used to prioritize grassland patches within a landscape for conservation
subsidies or management policies. Partial dependencies in our models
showed that increasing the proportion of grassland habitat is positively
associated with wild bee species richness, thereby justifying bee
conservation schemes that aim to enhance semi-natural grassland habitat.
Our results confirm the utility of satellite-derived land cover maps in
supporting high resolution species distribution modelling and suggest
there is scope to monitor changes in species distributions over time
given the dense time series provided by products like DW.