Aurelie Shapiro

Aurelie Shapiro
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations · National Forest Monitoring (NFM)

Doctor of Natural Science

About

65
Publications
101,043
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,766
Citations
Introduction
Aurelie Shapiro currently works at the Biodiversity, World Wide Fund For Nature, Germany. Aurélie supports new conservation technologies mainly using remote sensing, airborne LiDAR and drone data. Additional expertise in marine remote sensing, conservation planning, habitat modelling, wildlife conservation, REDD+ MRV and webGIS.
Additional affiliations
January 2010 - November 2018
WWF Germany
Position
  • Senior Remote Sensing Specialist
January 2010 - June 2016
World Wide Fund For Nature, Berlin, Germany
Position
  • Remote Sensing Specialist
January 2010 - present
World Wide Fund For Nature, Germany
Position
  • Remote Sensing Specialist

Publications

Publications (65)
Article
Full-text available
Mangrove forests are found across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region despite challenging environmental extremes, including highly variable temperatures and hypersalinity. Understanding the biophysical and anthropogenic factors that influence mangrove forest growth is key to locate suitable areas for regeneration and afforestation activities....
Article
Full-text available
The forests of Central Africa constitute the continent’s largest continuous tract of forest, maintained in part by over 200 protected areas across six countries with varying levels of restriction and enforcement. Despite protection, these Central African forests are subject to a multitude of overlapping proximate and underlying drivers of deforesta...
Article
Full-text available
Recent studies identifying underlying and proximate drivers of tropical deforestation and forest degradation have applied a multitude of methodologies, with varying and sometimes conflicting results. Divergent results can have implications for evidence-informed programs, policy action, and land use planning since these differences can lead to contr...
Chapter
Full-text available
Mangrove ecosystems are tropical coastal forests that are adapted to saltwater environments. Their unique qualities of existing primarily in moist environments at low elevation along shorelines, lack of seasonality, and compact pattern make them relatively easy to identify in satellite images. In this chapter, we present a series of automated steps...
Chapter
Full-text available
Shallow-water coastal benthic habitats, which can comprise seagrasses, sandy soft bottoms, and coral reefs are essential ecosystems, supporting fisheries, providing coastal protection, and sequestering ‘blue’ carbon. Multispectral satellite imagery, particularly with blue and green spectral bands, can penetrate clear, shallow water, allowing us to...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The plan to mitigate the rise in global temperature includes nature-based solutions such as the blue carbon stocks of coastal ecosystems. Seagrass meadows rank among the most efficient organic carbon sinks on Earth. However, due to the high costs of the required equipment and enormous environmental challenges, field data collection of underwater ha...
Preprint
Full-text available
The Congo Basin hosts the largest continuous tract of forest in Africa, regulating global climate while providing essential resources and livelihoods for humans, while harbouring extensive biodiversity. The threats to these forests are expected to increase. A regional collaborative effort has produced the first systematically validated remote sensi...
Article
Full-text available
Seagrass ecosystems are globally significant hot spots of blue carbon storage, coastal biodiversity and coastal protection, rendering them a so-called natural climate solution. Their potential as a natural climate solution has been largely overlooked in national and international climate strategies and financing. This stems mainly from the lack of...
Article
Full-text available
Many threats to biodiversity can be predicted and are well mapped but others are uncertain in their extent, impact on biodiversity, and ability for conservation efforts to address, making them more difficult to account for in spatial conservation planning efforts, and as a result, they are often ignored. Here, we use a spatial prioritisation analys...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The critically endangered West Pacific Ocean subpopulation of the leatherback turtles has faced a significant population decline in the past decades. One of the reasons for this is the loss of nesting habitats in the region. In this pilot study, turtle nesting habitats are remotely monitored employing satellite imageries. This methodology has been...
Article
Full-text available
Large-scale mapping activities can benefit from the vastly increasing availability of earth observation (EO) data, especially when combined with volunteered geographical information (VGI) using machine learning (ML). High-resolution maps of inland surface water bodies are important for water supply and natural disaster mitigation as well as for mon...
Article
Full-text available
Forest degradation, generally defined as a reduction in the delivery of forest ecosystem services, can have long-term impacts on biodiversity, climate, and local livelihoods. The quantification of forest degradation, its dynamics and proximate causes can help prompt early action to mitigate carbon emissions and inform relevant land use policies. Th...
Article
Full-text available
Forest degradation, generally defined as a reduction in the delivery of forest ecosystem services, can have long-term impacts on biodiversity, climate, and local livelihoods. The quantification of forest degradation, its dynamics and proximate causes can help prompt early action to mitigate carbon emissions and inform relevant land use policies. Th...
Preprint
Full-text available
The forests of the Greater Mekong Subregion, consisting of Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, are under high pressure from economic development and exploitation of natural resources, including but not limited to land concession, smallholder plantations and commercial agriculture, agroforestry development, mining, and road infrastructure...
Article
Full-text available
Quantifying ecological condition, notably the extent of forest degradation is important for understanding and designing measures to protect biodiversity and enhancing the capacity of forests to deliver ecosystem services. Conservation planning, particularly the prioritization of management interventions for forests, is often lacking spatial data on...
Article
Full-text available
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-20999-7.
Conference Paper
Coastal seascapes (seagrasses, mangroves, coral reefs, tidal flats) support the livelihoods of local communities, offer protection from extreme weather events, provide 25% of the oceanic carbon pool and support 25% of global biodiversity. Characterizing important ecosystems within this environment is an initial step to understanding their distribut...
Article
Full-text available
Many global environmental agendas, including halting biodiversity loss, reversing land degradation, and limiting climate change, depend upon retaining forests with high ecological integrity, yet the scale and degree of forest modification remain poorly quantified and mapped. By integrating data on observed and inferred human pressures and an index...
Article
Full-text available
The lack of detailed spatial information on coastal resources, notably shallow water coral reefs and associated benthic habitats, impedes our ability to protect and manage them in the face of global climate change and anthropogenic impacts. Here, we develop a semi‐automated workflow in the cloud that uses freely available Sentinel‐2 data from the E...
Technical Report
Full-text available
for more information visit: https://space-science.wwf.de/drones this is a detailed handbook for conservation practitioners (not just academics) to understand the benefits, opportunities, limits of drone technology. Drones are often hailed as a panacea for conservation problems - in this guide we use the scientific literature and 10 case studies (...
Article
Full-text available
The ecological functionality of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway is threatened by the loss of wetlands which provide staging and wintering sites for migrating waterbirds. The disappearance of wetland ecosystems due to coastal development prevents birds from completing their migrations, resulting in population declines, and even an eventual collap...
Article
Full-text available
The forests of Central Africa contain some of Earth's few remaining intact forests. These forests are increasingly threatened by infrastructure development, agriculture, and unsustainable extraction of natural resources (e.g. minerals, bushmeat, and timber), all of which is leading to deforestation and forest degradation, particularly defaunation,...
Article
Full-text available
In many savannah regions of Africa, pronounced seasonal variability in rainfall results in wildlife being restricted to floodplains and other habitats adjacent to permanent surface water in the dry season. During the wet season, rainfall fills small‐scale, ephemeral water sources that allow wildlife to exploit forage and other resources far from pe...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Baseline benthic habitat mapping of the Quirimbas National Park, using a cloud-based semi-automated workflow
Article
Full-text available
Multi-sensor remote sensing image classification has been considerably improved by deep learning feature extraction and classification networks. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-sensor fusion framework for the fusion of diverse remote sensing data sources. The novelty of this paper is grounded in three important design innovations: 1- a uniq...
Preprint
Full-text available
Measuring forest degradation is important for understanding and designing measures to protect biodiversity and the capacity of forests to deliver ecosystem services. Conservation planning, particularly the prioritization of management interventions for forests, is often lacking spatial data on ecological condition, and it is often overlooked within...
Preprint
Full-text available
Many global environmental agendas, including halting biodiversity loss, reversing land degradation, and limiting climate change, depend upon retaining forests with high ecological integrity, yet the scale and degree of forest modification remains poorly quantified and mapped. By integrating data on direct and indirect forest pressures and lost fore...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Massive and rapidly increasing use of plastics in modern society with short average use times and poor reuse and recycling options has resulted in a global threat with potentially devastating impacts on human and non-human life. Knowledge on the impacts of plastics in all forms on the planetary life-support system is rapidly accumulating and it und...
Article
Full-text available
Ocean ecosystems are in decline, yet we also have more ocean data, and more data portals, than ever before. To make effective decisions regarding ocean management, especially in the face of global environmental change, we need to make the best use possible of these data. Yet many data are not shared, are hard to find, and cannot be effectively acce...
Article
Full-text available
Forests in Southeast Asia are experiencing some of the highest rates of deforestation and degradation in the world, with natural forest species being replaced by cropland and plantation monoculture. In this work, we have developed an innovative method to accurately map rubber and palm oil plantations using fusion of Landsat-8, Sentinel 1 and 2. We...
Article
Full-text available
Demand for mangrove forest resources has led to a steady decline in mangrove area over the past century. Land conversions in the form of agriculture, aquaculture and urbanization account for much of the deforestation of mangrove wetlands. However, natural processes at the transition zone between land and ocean can also rapidly change mangrove sprea...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Mozambique has over 300,000 hectares of mangroves along its coast, which is the largest tract of mangrove forest in Africa, and ranks the country 13th in the word in terms of mangrove extent. WWF-Germany and WWF-Mozambique have partnered to map Mozambique's mangroves in efforts to conserve, manage and restore them. This analysis estimates mangrove...
Article
Full-text available
Forest cover and vegetation degradation was monitored across the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA) in southern Africa and the performance of three different methods in detecting degradation was assessed using reference data. Breaks for Additive Season and Trend (BFAST) Monitor was used to identify potential forest cover and veg...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This latest chapter in the Conservation Technology Series from WWF-UK looks at the opportunities, challenges and state-of-the-art of satellite remote sensing for conservation applications. This issue reviews available satellite imagery and derived datasets, a comprehensive guide to data sources, common processing workflows and case studies.
Article
Full-text available
National forest inventories in tropical regions are sparse and have large uncertainty in capturing the physiographical variations of forest carbon across landscapes. Here, we produce for the first time the spatial patterns of carbon stored in forests of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by using airborne LiDAR inventory of more than 432,000 ha of...
Technical Report
Full-text available
A guide to using LiDAR data for conservation - best practices, data sources, methods and extensive literature collection.
Technical Report
Full-text available
High Resolution Carbon Distribution in Forests of Democratic Republic of Congo A summary report of the Carbon Map and Model Project Performed at the University of California Los Angeles
Article
Full-text available
Background: Recent studies have shown that fragmentation is an increasing threat to global forests, which has major impacts on biodiversity and the important ecosystem services provided by forested landscapes. Several tools have been developed to evaluate global patterns of fragmentation, which have potential applications for REDD+. We study how c...
Article
Full-text available
Production of coral reef habitat maps from high spatial resolution multispectral imagery is common practice and benefits from standardized accuracy assessment methods and many informative studies on the merits of different processing algorithms. However, few studies consider the full production workflow, including factors such as operator influence...
Article
Full-text available
Mangroves are recognized for their valued ecosystem services provision while having the highest carbon density among forested ecosystems. Yet they are increasingly threatened by deforestation, conversion to agriculture and development, reducing the benefits they provide for local livelihoods, coastal protection and climate change mitigation. Accord...
Article
Full-text available
If parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and their partners are to report effectively on progress against national, regional and global biodiversity conservation goals, data will need to be collected at multiple levels. Global data sets, many gathered using remote sensing, offer partial solutions but need to be complemented by fie...
Article
Full-text available
The Primeiras and Segundas Archipelago Reserve is a recently established marine protected area, the largest in Africa, located in the waters of Northern Mozambique. This protected area is of significant local economic importance and global ecological relevance, containing the southernmost coral reefs in Eastern Africa. However, information related...
Article
Full-text available
Despite ever increasing availability of satellite imagery and spatial data, conservation managers, decision makers and planners are often unable to analyze data without special knowledge or software. WWF is bridging this gap by putting extensive spatial data into an easy to use online mapping environment, to allow visualization, manipulation and an...
Article
Full-text available
In the context of the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation (the REDD+ program), optical very high resolution (VHR) satellite images provide an opportunity to characterize forest canopy structure and to quantify aboveground biomass (AGB) at less expense than methods based on airborne remote sensing dat...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Menurut Undang-undang nomor 26 tahun 2007 tentang penataan ruang pasal 3 menyebutkan bahwa penyelenggaraan penataan ruang bertujuan untuk mewujudkan ruang wilayah nasional yang aman, nyaman, produktif dan berkelanjutan berlandaskan wawasan nusantara dan ketahanan nasional dengan terwujudnya keharmonisan antara lingkungan alam dan lingkungan buatan,...
Article
Full-text available
Water quality around the Island of Borneo is important for the coral reefs in Borneo's proximity. Sediment input into freshwater and marine ecosystems is a result of natural processes. However, mining, deforestation, poor agricultural practices can greatly increase sediment input into aquatic systems. According to time series analysis of the coasta...
Conference Paper
The human pressure on natural ecosystems and protected areas is steadily increasing. Urban growth is undeniably and irreversibly converting natural habitats as it is constantly expanding with population growth. In this study we analyze the urban expansion of mega city Calcutta over four time-steps (1975, 1990, 2000, 2010) as an example of expansion...
Conference Paper
Water quality around the Island of Borneo is important for the coral reefs in Borneo's proximity. Sediment input into freshwater and marine ecosystems is a result of natural processes. However, mining, deforestation, poor agricultural practices can greatly increase sediment input into aquatic systems. According to time series analysis of the coasta...
Data
Summary of recent and historical records of the flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps. (0.04 MB XLS)
Data
Flat-headed cat from the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary (ConCaSa). (7.56 MB MP4)
Article
Full-text available
Background: The flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps) is one of the world's least known, highly threatened felids with a distribution restricted to tropical lowland rainforests in Peninsular Thailand/Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra. Throughout its geographic range large-scale anthropogenic transformation processes, including the pollution of fresh...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps) is one of the world’s least known, highly threatened felids with a distribution restricted to tropical lowland rainforests in Peninsular Thailand/Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra. Throughout its geographic range large-scale anthropogenic transformation processes, including the pollution of fresh-...
Article
Full-text available
Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) imagery for eastern Puerto Rico, collected January of 1985 and March of 2000, was used to perform a multi-temporal classification technique to identify and quantify the dynamics of submerged aquatic vegetation (seagrass and macroalgae) in a study area located in Vieques Sound, off the...
Article
Full-text available
Continuous summit-to-sea maps showing both land features and shallow-water coral reefs have been completed in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, using circa 2000 Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) Imagery. Continuous land/sea terrain was mapped by merging Digital Elevation Models (DEM) with satellite-derived bathymetry. Benthic habitat...
Article
Full-text available
Human activity is commonly identified as a major contributor to the observed global deterioration of coral reef ecosystem health, with loss of live coral cover, declining species diversity, and reduced abundance reported in many areas (NOAA, 2002a; Wilkinson, 2002; Turgeon et al., 2002). Degradation in the structure and func-tioning of coral reef e...