Helmholtz Centre Potsdam GFZ German Research Centre for
Geosciences Abstract (EDOC: 15831) Hyperspectral satellite
remote sensing may considerably contribute to the mapping and
monitoring of dryland plant communities in nature reserve areas.
This is especially true in areas that are not otherwise
accessible and are undergoing rapid changes due to land use
conversion such as the nature reserve “Döberitzer Heide”. For
the purpose of mapping and understanding dynamic vegetation
structures within dryland habitats multidimensional vegetation
samples were transformed into comprehensive data spaces, using
non metric multidimensional scaling. The resulting topology of
field samples, consisting of species abundance could be
interpreted as the distribution of species similarities along
environmental gradients. A spatially explicit prediction of
these gradients could be achieved by generating deterministic
models from a PLS1 regression between ordination axis metrics
and spectral variables derived from field measurement