Assessment of biodiversity in Central Federal District using satellite-based maps of terrestrial ecosystems

A research study of the ecosystem biodiversity of the Central Federal District (CFD) has been carried out at the regional level with the use of the map of vegetation in the terrestrial ecosystems, which was created on the basis of the high spatial resolution (30 m) data obtained from the Landsat satellite series. Numerical characteristics such as the areas of the forest and other terrestral ecosystems; the number of forest plots; their average areas in a federal region; the disturbed forest land areas over the past 5 years; the proportions of the coniferous, deciduous, and mixed forests; and the total number of ecosystem types found in the federal region are calculated for each federal region in the Russian Federation within the CFD. The dominant landscape type is defined using a regular grid whose cell size matches the size of the average basal area of the forest plot on the vegetation map. The areas of the forest, agricultural, grassland, and agro-forest landscapes within each grid cell are estimated. The dominant landscape areas are assessed for each federal region; the analysis reveals that, on average, a quarter of all land areas in the district are occupied by agroforest landscapes. A logical sequence of research activities has been presented to assess the indicators of biodiversity in the forest and other terrestrial ecosystems and their functions and services.