The “BACI” baci translates satellite data streams into novel “essential biodiversity variables” by integrating ground-based observations. The trans-disciplinary project offers new insights into the functioning and state of ecosystems and biodiversity. BACI enables the user community to detect abrupt and transient changes of ecosystems and quantify the implications for regional biodiversity. Other key elements are, firstly attributing ecosystem transformations to societal transformations, and secondly developing a prototype early warning system for detecting disturbances at the interface of land ecosystems and atmosphere.

University College London lead work package 2, provided the core requirement of timely and consistent spatial data to be used as input to the BACI analysis framework. This was primarily Earth Observation Sattelite data, but also additional spatial data such as elevation and slope/aspect. WP2 will provide a generic, scaleable framework for combining data from multiple streams for input into BACI index analysis, effectively a multi-source, surface change detection system.

The output of work package 2 was a system ‘state vector’ representing the state of a point/region on the land surface at a given time as a function of input data (reflectance, Δreflectance i.e. change in reflectance since the last observation, LST, backscatter and multi-temporal backscatter statistics, interferometric coherence, soil moisture, freeze/thaw, snow characteristics, albedo, vegetation state, ancillary), with uncertainty archived at CEDA.

The project co-ordinated by the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry ran from April 2015 - March 2019

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 640176