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A National Ecosystem Assessment of the UK Overseas Territory Montserrat: Earth Observation Based Mapping and Interpretation 2018

Abstract

Montserrat is a highly biodiverse, volcanic and mountainous island within the UK Caribbean Overseas Territories. The island's ecosystems provide multiple benefits, such as the provision of fresh water, maintaining soil fertility and a variety of food resources, as well as being an important source of income through the exploitation of its unique biodiversity to promote tourism.

This project sits within the first phase of producing a baseline Natural Capital Account for Montserrat, and has three objectives: (1) To use Earth Observation (EO) to enhance and update an existing Montserrat terrestrial map following the Living Maps for biodiversity and natural capital approach developed by Natural England. (2) To use the updated habitat data to produce a suite of spatial metrics to inform a parallel project undertaking a baseline economic valuation of natural capital on Montserrat, carried out by Eftec Ltd. (3) To provide recommendations for a monitoring and reporting system for Montserrat based on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data.

This report describes how the habitat map was produced, how it was used to produce spatial metrics on agricultural sub-categories, forest canopy density, forest clearing activity, coastal sediment plumes and soil erosion risk, and makes recommendations on future EO-based monitoring on the island.

Resource type Publication

Topic category Environment

Reference date 2018·05·01

Lineage
Refer to report

Responsible organisation
Communications, JNCC distributor

Limitations on public access No limitations

Use constraints Open, cite source of data

Metadata date 2019·10·18

Metadata point of contact
Communications, JNCC

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