The Queensland Government, Department of Environment and Science funded an applied research project to update a koala habitat manager’s toolkit for assessing habitat health. This project included adding procedures for a time series, satellite remote sensing, climate varied, vegetation health proxies. These procedures needed to be simple, inexpensive and effective. Often satellite remote sensing derived biophysical parameter map production can be convoluted, expensive and (from a time series perspective) not as effective as it could be. The issue is that very high-resolution images are not cheap – and revisit times of the instrument can make image acquisition an issue. On the other hand, inexpensive (even free) imagery, while solving revisit times, is spatially coarse. Some instruments have the radiometric capability to provide a range of vegetation health indices (leaf water content, for example) – some do not.

This study wades into the water of satellite imagery specifications and proposes an approach that is free-of-cost (for imagery and for the software needed to process that imagery) and is reasonably simple to use. For public or private koala habitat managers, the satellite image augmented field assessment guide helps in their decision-making processes for habitat health interventions and management decisions.

Further, image processing allows habitat managers to compare vegetation health for different climate regimes.