I have a good bird community data set and want to relate functional groups etc. to vegetation but, I do not have time for lots of fieldwork to measure veg. characters. Also, what amount of ground-truthing would be necessary for the proposed method.
Hi Rion,
You can perform statistical correlation between bird diversity index based on your bird dataset using e.g. Shannon-Wienner and several Vegetation Index calculation e.g. NDVI, TVI, RVI from LANDSAT images. The hypothesis is that bird diversity has a significant correlation with value of Vegetation Index.
Good luck!
May help:
Predicting Tropical Dry Forest Successional Attributes from Space: Is the Key Hidden in Image Texture?
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0030506#pone-0030506-g003
Index e.g. NDVI, TVI, RVI from LANDSAT images has a significant correlation with value of Vegetation Index.
Hi all, an update. I derived NDVI and EVI from Landsat 8 and then derived two raster data sets: slope and aspect from a 1 arc second DEM. I am busy looking into performing analyses called RLQ and fourth-corner. Basically I want to relate bird species functional traits to these enviro. characters. Thanks for all the help and...keep the comments coming!