The Local Ecological Footprinting Tool (LEFT) www.left.ox.ac.uk is a free of charge web-based decision support tool developed to help evaluate the pattern of relative ecological value across a landscape to inform planning of land use in order to minimize environmental impacts. A user defines an area of interest anywhere globally using a web-based map and the tool then automatically processes a series of high-quality datasets using standard published algorithms to produce maps at 30m resolution of land cover class, numbers of globally threatened terrestrial vertebrate and plant species, beta-diversity of terrestrial vertebrates and plants, habitat intactness, wetland habitat connectivity, numbers of migratory species and vegetation resilience. The tool then generates a custom pdf report and a zip file of GIS data for the area requested within a few minutes. This tool has been designed to be highly intuitive to use, and requires no specialized software or user expertise.
Results/Conclusions
A key question for users of this tool, however, is how representative is the remotely obtained output compared to what is on the ground. To test this, maps were generated using the LEFT algorithms on two distinct study areas for beta-diversity and distribution of threatened species (vulnerability). We compared results from using global datasets as implemented in LEFT with results of using biodiversity records collected in the field from long-term landscape scale monitoring programmes for multiple taxonomic groups. The comparison method consists of a multivariate measure of similarity between two fields based on discrete wavelet transforms, and revealed consistent agreement across a wide range of spatial scales. There was excellent agreement between the results from both methods. These results suggest that remote assessment tools such as LEFT hold great potential for determining key ecological features across landscapes and for being utilized in preplanning biodiversity assessment tools