Species Monitoring Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to Reveal the Ecological Role of Plateau Pika in Maintaining Vegetation Diversity on the Northeastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

作者：Yu Qin, Yi Sun, Wei Zhang, Yan Qin, Jianjun Chen, Zhiwei Wang, Zhaoye Zhou · 发表于：Remote Sensing · 年份：2020 · DOI：10.3390/rs12152480 · 被引用次数：26 · 研究领域：Wildlife Ecology and Conservation、Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies、Species Distribution and Climate Change

Plateau pika (Ochotona curzoniae, hereafter pika) is considered to exert a profound impact on vegetation species diversity of alpine grasslands. Great efforts have been made at mound or quadrat scales; nevertheless, there is still controversy about the effect of pika. It is vital to monitor vegetation species composition in natural heterogeneous ecosystems at a large scale to accurately evaluate the real role of pika. In this study, we performed field survey at 55 alpine grassland sites across the Shule River Basin using combined methods of aerial photographing using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and traditional ground measurement. Based on our UAV operation system, Fragmentation Monitoring and Analysis with aerial Photography (FragMAP), aerial images were acquired. Plot-scale vegetation species were visually identified, and total pika burrow exits were automatically retrieved using the self-developed image processing software. We found that there were significant linear relationships between the vegetation species diversity indexes obtained by these two methods. Additionally, the total number of identified species by the UAV method was 71, which was higher than the Quadrat method recognition, with the quantity of 63. Our results indicate that the UAV was suitable for long-term repeated monitoring vegetation species composition of multiple alpine grasslands at plot scale. With the merits of UAV, it confirmed that pika’s disturbance belonged to the medium level, with the de...