Mariela Soto-Berelov

• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at RMIT University

Riparian vegetation is important for biodiversity, creates habitat for various fauna and provides vital ecosystem services such as flow regulation, water filtration, uptake, transformation and cycling of minerals, nutrients and organic matter. These ecological functions and processes contribute to the health of waterways. In many urban and semiurba...

Wetlands are under increasing pressure from threatening processes. Efforts to protect and monitor wetlands are hampered without datasets capturing the extent, type, and condition. The purpose of this study is to map the distribution of wetland type, vegetation type and vegetation condition for wetlands in the Northern Jarrah Forest region, Western...

A basalt lava plain covers much of central and western Victoria in Australia. Many of the younger flows (<1 Ma) have hummocky surfaces with abundant tumuli and lava rises, known locally as stony rises due to the protruding basalt boulders. Stony rises are noteworthy geologically but have ecological importance and are culturally significant to Abori...

Burn severity has been widely studied. Typical approaches use spectral differencing indices from remotely sensed data to extrapolate in-situ severity assessments. Next generation geostationary data offer near-continuous fire behaviour information, which has been used for fire detection and monitoring but remains underutilized for fire impact estima...

Passive and active spaceborne remote sensing technologies play a key role in monitoring forests across large areas, particularly when combining the advantages of both sensor technologies. This study investigates the link between spectral and structural change metrics following forest fire disturbance, collected from Landsat satellites and the Globa...

Research Highlights: We used Landsat time series data to investigate the role forest tenure and protection status play in the recovery of a forest after a fire. Background and Objectives: Changing fire regimes put forests in southeast Australia under increasing pressure. Our investigation aimed to explore the impact of different forest management s...

Geostationary and polar-orbiting remote sensors have different opportunities to observe wildfires. While polar-orbiting sensors have been favoured in wildfire observations, geostationary sensors offer a higher observation frequency. Here, we assess the utility of the Himawari-8 AHI geostationary product and compare it to established polar-orbiting...

Context Home range studies allow investigation of faunal habitat use within a well-defined area, and for some species, the concept of ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ home ranges provides the means to examine how resource use varies within home ranges. Taking this approach, we investigated whether koalas preferentially used areas of taller forest canopy withi...

Protected areas play a crucial role in the conservation and management of wildlife, but land use and land cover change (LULCC) threatens the status of protected areas. Sri Lanka has a history of severe human–elephant conflict (HEC). In the last 15 years, Sri Lanka has recorded the highest mortality of elephants and the second-highest human casualti...

Protected areas play a crucial role in the conservation and management of wildlife, but land use and land cover change (LULCC) threatens the status of protected areas. Sri Lanka has a history of severe human–elephant conflict (HEC). In the last 15 years, Sri Lanka has recorded the highest mortality of elephants and the second-highest human casualti...

Human–elephant conflict (HEC) is a key environmental issue in number of Asian countries, including Sri Lanka. Incidents of HEC have significantly increased in Sri Lanka between 1991 and 2018, with 1734 human deaths reported in this period (281% increase), 4837 elephant deaths (1172% increase), 1053 human injuries (140% increase) and more than 23,00...

Background We compared estimates of Fire Radiative Power (FRP) from sensors onboard geostationary Himawari-8 (BRIGHT_AHI) and polar-orbiting TERRA/AQUA (MOD14/MYD14) satellites during the 2019/2020 Black Summer Fires in South-Eastern Australia. Aim/methods Analysis was performed on a pixel, bioregion, and wildfire event basis to assess the utility...

Forest structure is an important variable in ecology, fire behaviour, and carbon management. New spaceborne lidar sensors, such as the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), enable forest structure to be mapped at a global scale. Virtual GEDI-like observations can be derived from airborne laser scanning (ALS) data for given locations using...

Protrusions of basalt outcrops, locally known as Stony Rises, are an important feature in the Indigenous cultural and ecological landscape of Victoria. Due to various types of land development, Stony Rises are disappearing at a rapid rate, along with the history associated with them. Stony Rises can be found across the Victorian Volcanic Plain, whi...

Comprehensive and robust estimations of forest disturbance over time are lacking in many parts of the world. In recent years, Landsat satellite data has been used extensively to retrospectively map forest disturbance across several decades. Human interpretation of Landsat time series, in association with ancillary data, has emerged as an effective...

Marine plastic debris (MPD) is a globally relevant environmental challenge, with an estimated 8 million tons of synthetic debris entering the marine environment each year. Plastic has been found in all parts of the marine environment, including the surface layers of the ocean, within the water column, in coastal waters, on the benthic layer and on...

Previous research has shown that the Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) prefers larger trees, potentially making this a key factor influencing koala habitat quality. Generally, tree height is considered at regional scales which may overlook variation at patch or local scales. In this study, we aimed to derive a set of parameters to assist in classifyin...

Floating and washed ashore marine plastic debris (MPD) is a growing environmental challenge. It has become evident that secluded locations including the Arctic, Antarctic, and remote islands are being impacted by plastic pollution generated thousands of kilometers away. Optical remote sensing of MPD is an emerging field that can aid in monitoring r...

The Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) is an arboreal marsupial found throughout southeastern Australia. A high risk of extinction in some areas requires adherence to legislation mandating protection of high‐quality habitat. The Koala primarily eats leaves of the Eucalyptus genus and wildlife managers are, in most cases, currently dependent on habitat...

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) are dynamic over time and space due to human and biophysical factors. Accurate and up-to-date LULCC information is a mandatory part of environmental change analysis and natural resource management. In Sri Lanka, there is a significant temporal gap in the existing LULCC information due to the civil war that too...

The regular and consistent measurements provided by Earth observation satellites can support the monitoring and reporting of forest indicators. Although substantial scientific literature espouses the capabilities of satellites in this area, the techniques are under-utilised in national reporting, where there is a preference for aggregating ad hoc d...

The free open access data policy instituted for the Landsat archive since 2008 has revolutionised the use of Landsat data for forest monitoring, especially for estimating forest aboveground biomass (AGB). This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent approaches utilising Landsat time-series (LTS) for estimating AGB and its dynamics across sp...

Understanding forest biomass dynamics is crucial for carbon and environmental monitoring, especially in the context of climate change. In this study, we propose a robust approach for monitoring aboveground forest biomass (AGB) dynamics by combining Landsat time-series with single-date inventory data. We developed a Random Forest (RF) based kNN mode...

Estimating change in forest biomass is important for monitoring carbon dynamics and understanding the global carbon cycle. Multi-temporal airborne lidar data has been recently used to accurately predict change in forest attributes such as aboveground biomass (AGB). In this study, we assessed the ability of multi-temporal airborne lidar (2008 and 20...

Across the world, millions of hectares of forest are burned by wildfires each year. Satellite remote sensing, particularly when used in time series, can describe complex disturbance‐recovery processes, but is underutilized by ecologists. This study examines whether a greater disturbance magnitude equates to a longer recovery length, in the fire‐ada...

Time series analysis of Landsat data is widely used for assessing forest change at the large-area scale. Various change detection algorithms have been proposed, each employing different techniques to characterise abrupt disturbance events and longer term trends. However, results can vary significantly, depending on the algorithm, parameters and the...

The prediction of forest biomass at the landscape scale can be achieved by integrating data from field plots with satellite imagery, in particular data from the Landsat archive, using k-nearest neighbour (kNN) imputation models. While studies have demonstrated different kNN imputation approaches for estimating forest biomass from remote sensing dat...

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) is intrinsically dynamic over time and space due to human and biophysical factors. Accurate and up-to-date land use/cover information is a mandatory requirement in environmental change analysis and natural resource management. Satellite earth observation is being increasingly applied in LULCC detection across...

This chapter presents good practice guidelines for the creation of a reference dataset that takes advantage of an existing forest inventory plot network. The reference dataset consists of 7860 reference pixels over a large area containing public land forests in the state of Victoria, Australia. The reference dataset is built around an extensive for...

Satellite earth observation is being increasingly used to monitor forests across the world. Freely available Landsat data stretching back four decades, coupled with advances in computer processing capabilities, has enabled new time-series techniques for analyzing forest change. Typically, these methods track individual pixel values over time, throu...

Forest cover products are an essential tool for land managers and policy makers. They are used at a variety of spatial scales to inform decision-making and policy across a range of ecosystem drivers and services. This article compares three forest cover products (FCP), all of which were created using Landsat satellite imagery, but using different m...

We introduce a grand narrative on the development of Levantine Bronze Age civilization by applying digital technology to integrate long-term paleovegetation modeling with regional settlement patterns over the course of two millennia in the mid-Holocene. We consider the implications of shifts in potential vegetation linked with ancient climate chang...

The so-called clumping factor (Ω) quantifies deviation from a random 3D distribution of material in a vegetation canopy and therefore characterises the spatial distribution of gaps within a canopy. Ω is essential to convert effective Plant or Leaf Area Index into actual LAI or PAI, which has previously been shown to have a significant impact on bio...

Burnt area is a critical parameter for estimating emissions of greenhouse gases associated with biomass burning. Several burnt area products (BAPs) derived from Earth Observation satellites/sensors have been released; these are based on different spatial resolutions and derived using different methodologies so that accuracies can vary amongst them....

Sustainable forest management requires consistent and simple approaches for characterizing forest changes through time and space at the landscape scale. Landsat satellite data, with its long archive and comprehensive spatial, temporal and spectral detail, could enable us to achieve this goal. This study develops a consistent approach for mapping bo...

Estimating the proportion of woody-to-total plant material ‘α’ is an essential step to convert Plant Area Index ‘PAI’ estimates into Leaf Area Index ‘LAI’. α has also been shown to have a significant impact on the passive optical remote sensing signal for retrieval of biophysical parameters in forests, woodlands, and savannas. However, benchmarked...

This paper presents a methodology for the attribution and characterisation of Sclerophyll forested landscapes over large areas. First we define a set of woody vegetation data primitives (e.g. canopy cover, leaf area index (LAI), bole density, canopy height), which are then scaled-up using multiple remote sensing data sources to characterise and ext...

This paper presents a methodology for the attribution and characterisation of Sclerophyll forested landscapes over large areas. First we define a set of woody vegetation data primitives (e.g. canopy cover, leaf area index (LAI), bole density, canopy height), which are then scaled-up using multiple remote sensing data sources to characterise and ext...

1. The vertical arrangement of forest canopies is a key descriptor of canopy structure, a driver of ecosystem function and indicative of forest successional stage. Yet techniques to attribute for canopy vertical structure across large and potentially heterogeneously forested areas remain elusive. 2. This study introduces a new technique to estimat...

Leaf Area Index (LAI) is typically defined as the total one-sided area of leaf tissues per unit of ground surface area. Utilizing this definition, LAI is a dimensionless unit which characterises the canopy of a given ecosystem (Breda, 2003). LAI and the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (fAPAR) are two biophysical parameters...

In the context of remote sensing, validation refers to the process of assessing the uncertainty of higher level, satellite sensor derived products by analytical comparison to reference data, which is presumed to represent the true value of an attribute. Biophysical products characterise and map biotic and abiotic factors that influence the survival...

Earth Observation data are regarded as critical and essential information across multiple sectors in most countries around the world. However, for the EO data to be useful, to support decision making and reporting activities, the collection of image and field data sets needs to be accurate, precise and able to be reproduced following appropriate pr...

Operational assessment of forest structure is an on-going challenge for land managers, particularly over large, remote or inaccessible areas. Here, we present an easily adopted method for generating a continuous map of canopy height at a 30 m resolution, demonstrated over 2.9 million hectares of highly heterogeneous forest (canopy height 0–70 m) in...

Pulse density, the number of laser pulses that intercept a surface per unit area, is a key consideration when acquiring an Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) dataset. This study compares area-based vegetation structure metrics derived from multi-return ALS simulated at six pulse densities (0.05 to 4 pl m-2) across a range of forest types: from savannah...

Earth Observation data are regarded as critical and essential information across multiple sectors in most countries around the world. However, for the EO data to be useful, to support decision making and reporting activities, the collection of image and field data sets needs to be accurate, precise and able to be reproduced following appropriate pr...

In the context of remote sensing, validation refers to the process of assessing the uncertainty of higher level, satellite sensor derived products by analytical comparison to reference data, which is presumed to represent the true value of an attribute. Biophysical products characterise and map biotic and abiotic factors that influence the survival...

Leaf Area Index (LAI) is typically defined as the total one-sided area of leaf tissues per unit of ground surface area. Utilizing this definition, LAI is a dimensionless unit which characterises the canopy of a given ecosystem (Breda, 2003). LAI and the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (fAPAR) are two biophysical parameters...

Images collected from aircraft or satellites and transformed to produce maps of features of the surface of the earth are commonly referred to as Earth Observation (EO) data. They are one of the most widely used sources of information and are used globally for mapping, monitoring and modelling our environments and their changes over time (e.g., Love...

Vertical structural complexity describes the arrangement and quantity of leaves, branches and stems along the vertical axis and is a key descriptor of forest structure. Owing to non-linear succession in native forests stands, vertical structure is not a function of age or height and therefore can not be assumed. Characterising forest structure over...

We integrate modern spatial distributions of plant geographical regions with paleoclimatic trends to model vegetation change in the Southern Levant over the course of the mid-Holocene. This timespan witnessed the rise, collapse and redevelopment of urbanized society and settlement during the Bronze Age. This study applies GIS and statistical modeli...

Seagrass beds are highly productive ecosystems and a decline in this habitat has become a global concern in recent decades. This study mapped seagrass at three sites in Port Phillip Bay between 1939 and 2011 and reviewed possible influences on seagrass cover changes. Historical aerial photographs from multiple sources were digitally scanned and ort...

Non-parametric methods for estimating forest inventory attributes from satellite imagery are used routinely in northern hemisphere countries and have the potential to be successfully applied in complex Australian forest ecosystems. This study presents experiments integrating Landsat and forest monitoring field plots, to produce forest attribute map...

Calibration and validation of LAI products require accurate ground-based measurements. Many indirect ground-based sensors such as digital hemispherical photography (DHP), ceptometers, and terrestrial laser scanners (TLS) are used interchangeably to estimate reference values. However these sensors have biases in regards to the true LAI value, which...

Collaborative ventures in research infrastructure can allow multiple stakeholders to benefit from outcomes that may otherwise be cost prohibitive. In this study, we discuss how the investment in research infrastructure by various sectors of the academic, scientific, and land management community is promoting high end forest ecosystem research in Au...

MAUP theory is applied to a LiDAR dataset acquired over a forested scene. The Weibull Probability Density Function (PDF) has been fit to LiDAR derived canopy height profiles for plots covering the complete 1 × 1 km scene. Ten plot sizes are tested from 10 - 300 m. Parameters describing the location and scale of the PDF are used as analogous of cano...

There is a need for accurate estimation of Australian woody vegetation parameters. State and Commonwealth land management agencies are mandated to report about forest condition every five years. The CRCSI 2.07 “Australian woody vegetation landscape feature generation from multi-source airborne and space-borne imaging and ranging data” aims at produ...

Leaf Area Index (LAI) and vegetation cover are important metrics for deriving structural information of forest ecosystems across multiple scales. Ground-based measurements of LAI are necessary for up-scaling to coarse resolution satellite products as well as for calibrating and validating such products derived from airborne and satellite remote sen...

Differences in land use and land cover often coincide with social and political borders. Using vegetation indices and a visual inspection of Landsat imagery, we consider a rural section of the central Arizona-Sonora border dominated by government-owned land on the U.S. side and seek to understand where and why cross-border land cover continuity exi...

Land-use/cover change (LUCC) has been a focus of study on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico for the last decade. Researchers have grappled with forest regeneration processes and urban growth in an island setting as indirect consequences of major economic drivers shifting from agriculture to manufacture. Existing research indicates that urban grow...