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Source 04 — Entry
Remote sensing
Remote sensing measures the landscape from above: satellites, aircraft and drones record imagery and other signals that show habitat, vegetation, water and change over time. It rarely sees individual animals, but it describes where they can live.
Specimen card
At a glance
Imagery and measurements from satellite missions, aerial surveys and drones, from free global archives to high-resolution flights over one site.
Raster layers (images, indices, land-cover maps), point clouds and orthomosaics, each with sensor, date, resolution and coordinate system. Drone imagery is also used to count animals directly in some surveys.
Google Earth Engine for large-scale analysis, Copernicus Browser for Sentinel data, Global Forest Watch for forest change, QGIS for GIS work, OpenDroneMap for drone imagery. All tools →
OGC GeoTIFF for georeferenced rasters and STAC for describing collections of imagery.
Matching scales. A satellite pixel, a drone flight and a camera location describe different areas and dates; linking them to animal records needs careful choice of resolution and time window.
Through the life cycle
From field to archive
Choose sensor, resolution and dates to match the habitat question; for drones, check flight rules and disturbance to wildlife.
Store source scenes or their references with processing settings; derived layers are large, so keep the recipe as well as the result.
Correct, mosaic and classify; validate maps with ground observations.
Share layers with full metadata (sensor, date, resolution, projection) and catalogue them with STAC where useful.
Archive processing code and inputs, so maps can be reproduced and compared with future imagery.
Other sources
Camera traps · GPS tracking & telemetry · Acoustic monitoring · Field observations & surveys · Citizen science