Investigating habitat association of breeding birds using public domain satellite imagery and land cover data.

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

Twenty-five years after the implementation of the Birds Directive in 1979, Europe‟s farmland bird species and long-distance migrants continue to decrease at an alarming rate. Farmland supports more bird species of conservation concern than any other habitat in Europe. Therefore, it is imperative to understand farmland species‟ relationship with their habitats. Bird conservation requires spatial information; this understanding not only serves as a check on the individual species‟ populations, but also as a measure of the overall health of the ecosystem as birds are good indicators of the state of the environment. The target species in this study is the corn bunting Miliaria calandra, a bird whose numbers in northern and central Europe have declined sharply since the mid-1970s. This study utilizes public domain data, namely Landsat imagery and CORINE land cover, along with the corn bunting‟s presence-absence data, to create a predictive distribution map of the species based on habitat preference. Each public domain dataset was preprocessed to extract predictor variables. Predictive models were built in R using logistic regression.(...)