Mapping Artificial Light At Night (ALAN) with night-time satellite imagery in order to help preserve biodiversity
Résumé
Satellite image processing engineers, biodiversity experts, and artificial light experts in Cerema (Center for Studies and Expertise on Risks, Environment, Mobility, and Urban Planning) worked together to better quantify the pressure put by Artificial Light At Night (ALAN) on biodiversity. The purpose is to identify priority areas to work on public and private lighting. Indeed, most animals are active at night and sensitive to ALAN. Preserving and restoring an ecological network supportive to nocturnal wildlife is imperative.
Satellite imagery shows a substantial potential to map ALAN as it covers large territories several times per year, at different spatial resolution (global, national, regional scale, or even individual lighting sources thanks to very high resolution).
LuoJia 1-01 is a Chinese experimental satellite that has taken night-time images over France in 2018. Its 130 m spatial resolution enables to study ALAN at a neighbourhood level. These freely available radiance data have a low level of processing and must be orthorectified before use. Clouds also need to be detected and masked.
Cerema processed these 217 images over France and combined them to build a nearly national map of ALAN, produced at the departmental level. Some departments are missing because of the lack of acquisitions, or the dense cloud cover. Orthorectification was achieved with Ground Control Points (GCP) from the Copernicus High Resolution Layer (HRL) Impervious Built-Up (IBU), as ALAN and imperviousness were shown to be strongly correlated.
The nearly national map of France ALAN produced will be freely available for all public entities. Such a map can be produced over other European countries, depending on the available LuoJia 1-01 data.
This map is interesting for biodiversity and lighting experts. Facing these data with other sources (local taxes database or biodiversity maps) can provide even more valuable information.
Domaines
Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]
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Bousquet-Mapping_Artificial_Light_At_Night-109.pdf (817.28 Ko)
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