GI_Forum 2013, Volume 1, pp. 496-499, 2013/06/20
Creating the GISociety – Conference Proceedings
We have created an indicator system whose main aim is to assess significant changes in the habitats existing in Sierra Nevada Natura 2000 site. This system is able to automatically download, process and analyse raw data from two MODIS products (snow cover and vegetation indexes). Besides, the system calculates automatically several indicators useful to assess different ecological functions of Sierra Nevada habitats: phenology, seasonality of biomass production, duration of snow cover, etc. We also calculate trends in those indicators. These indicators are aggregated into composite indexes that allow the identification of habitats suffering significant changes in both their ecological functions and physical context. Finally we created an ontology that adds semantic meaning to the whole dataset. This allows the formulation of complex questions regarding the changes observed in habitats.