Key Areas for Biodiversity in Luxembourg
Institution
Musée national d'histoire naturelle
Du : 01/09/2003
Au : 31/08/2006
Budget : 233 413,00€
Contact(s) :
Colling Guy
Summary
The general aims of the project were:
- the analysis of historical landuse changes with the aim to document them and to model future developments (landscape fragmentation, built area, agricultural field regrouping),
- the definition of key areas for biodiversity in Luxembourg.
In 2006 we finished our work on historical landuse changes. It resulted in digital layers of the built areas, highways, national street and railway networks for the years 1997 (2002), 1989, 1979, 1964 and partly for 1954. This allowed us to document past urbanisation and fragmentation of the luxemburgian landscapes as well as to describe the actual situation. We described landscape fragmentation with both vector and raster data models. We are currently modelling future developments on the basis of the acquired data, with the help of special software packages.
In line with our broad approach for defining key biodiversity areas we also calculated a certain number of landscape metrics indexes at the square kilometer grid level (for example number of patches, edge density, Shannon’s diversity and evenness indexes) for open and wooded habitats as well as for a mixed layer of both.
The works of defining green corridors and documenting agricultural landscape changes caused by field regrouping are continuing.
Different covers have been analysed to find out the most interesting parameter for biodiversity. For the forest mapping “cartographie forestière” for example, which contains a relevé of plants for each polygon of natural forest we evaluated parameters like total number of species, number of threatened species, frequencies of species….
The land use cartography “cartographie de l’occupation biophysique du sol” from 1999 has been used to calculate indicators about landscape structure like hedges, trees, and rivers density per surface area of open land and per square kilometers.
The relation between certain species groups and land use types from the OBS cartography and other parameters like geology or topography have been documented in a database. This information has been used to attribute a potential presence of a species in a land use type, where the species and the related land use type coexist inside an grid area of one square kilometer.
