The current vegetation database of the Institute of Botany, Slovak Academy of Sciences, the Slovak Vegetation Database (SVD), is one of the largest national vegetation databases in Europe. It contains phytosociological relevés from the early 1920s to the present time, which allows us to analyze vegetation changes in time. This database was used successfully for describing changes in riparian forests from the 1950s up to the present.
We showed significant increase in occurrence of neophyte species and decrease in native species diversity, and also vanishing of the moistest subassociation of the Salicetum albae.
Recently, the database is used for analyses of the spatial distribution of Natura 2000 habitats. Phytosociological relevés from SVD contain a pointwise spatial information about the occurrence of Natura 2000 habitats which was used for initialization of segmentation algorithms determining accurately the real habitat boundaries from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 Earth observation data. For segmentations, the semi-automatic and fully automatic algorithms and software tools was developed, together with suitable filtering methods necessary for mining useful information from the static optical satellite data. Such new identification of Natura 2000 habitats and their precise localization is necessary step for automatic monitoring of habitat area and condition changes over the time from continuously determined satellite information using our software NaturaSat. By the continuous tracking we will obtain long time series data which can be used for prediction of the habitat status in the future and can provide an early warning if there is a significant loss of the habitat area, increase of its fragmentation or any changes in vegetation structure or condition.
Links:
Slovak Vegetation Database (SVD)
