The team from the Habitat Diversity / Land Use Monitoring Module at the Thünen Institute of Farm Economics was represented at ESA's Living Planet Symposium 2025 with various contributions. The focus was on the further development of MonViA indicators for trend monitoring of biodiversity using satellite data.
ESA's Living Planet Symposium is one of the world's largest conferences on Earth observation. It has been held every three years since 2012 and this year it attracted more than 6,500 participants from more than 90 countries.
In the Habitat Diversity module, the Thünen Earth Observation (ThEO) working group at the Thünen Institute is developing methods for comprehensive and nationwide monitoring of indicators using satellite data, which enable the trend monitoring in MonViA.
Current research was presented to a global audience at the Living Planet Symposium in Vienna. These included, for example:
- the evaluation of methods for detecting grassland use intensity,
- the development of a methodology for the continuous recording of crop cover in agricultural land and
- the conceptual and prototype development of a composite indicator for habitat diversity on agricultural land.
In addition, a Germany-wide mapping of agricultural land use for the last 35 years was presented for the first time. The work is based on long-term, dense satellite data, including those from the Copernicus program, and innovative image processing techniques such as deep learning.
Our work found great interest in the research community. In particular, the exchange with researchers from other European countries and institutions has provided us with considerable inspiration for the future development and utilization of our approaches and indicators on habitat diversity, even beyond biodiversity monitoring. One example of successful cooperation is our collaboration with the European Commission's Joint Research Center on mapping farmland habitat diversity.
Further information:
Thünen Earth Observation (ThEO) website
All contributions of Thünen-Earth Observation to the Living Planet Symposium