Towards the Computational Assessment of the Conservation Status of a Habitat

We propose methods to automatically assess the conservation status of a habitat. Habitat monitoring is usually performed by botanists and other specialists in their field work, searching for the presence or lack of typical plant species (Evans D, Arvela M (2011) Assessment and reporting under Article 17 of the Habitats Directive. Explanatory Notes & Guidelines for the period 2007–2012. European Commission, Brussels.) and other elements (such as vegetation cover) that might indicate the degradation of a habitat. We present preliminary work that makes use of a robotic platform employed to help botanists in their tasks. Three methods are proposed. First a color segmentation method, to detect the amount of green in a given area, a detection method to automatically detect the presence of a given plant, and finally a classification method used to identify a plant in a single image.