Remote Sensing and Landcover in Ring-Necked Pheasant Research: A Review of Data Sources and Scales

Documenting wildlife-habitat relationships at multiple scales is essential for conservation. Remote sensing datasets and their derivatives (e.g., landcover data) enable efficient multi-scale assessment of ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) habitat, albeit with trade-offs among their thematic, spatial, temporal, and/or spectral grains and extents. For example, the National Agriculture Imagery Program provides fine spatial but coarse spectral grain imagery, both important for identifying pheasant habitats. Spatial technologies and datasets relevant to pheasant research are advancing, yet the information on the data sources utilized in research to date is limited. Remote sensing and landcover datasets surveys in pheasant research could help fill information gaps in pheasant-habitat relationships. In this systematic review, we filtered 1110 peer-reviewed pheasant habitat studies to 65 from the Central United States. Temporal trends were tested in the broad use of remote sensing and the selection of remote sensing platforms and data types. Of the selected studies, 26 used remote sensing or landcover data, which were classified by the thematic, spatial, temporal, and spectral grains and extents. Remote sensing and landcover data products increased over time, particularly satellite-based landcover products with relatively coarse thematic resolutions (e.g., crops and grassland), moderate spatial grains (e.g., 30-m), and spatial extents (e.g., smaller than the average US county). Remote sensing photography/imagery with multispectral sensors and coarse spectral resolution (e.g., three bands with 100 nm width) was also prominent but remained constant over time. We found no evidence of research with remote sensing or landcover data at multiple temporal grains and extents. Several studies lacked scale reporting, potentially limiting our inference. Scale transparency is important due to species selecting their habitat at multiple scales, making findings scale-dependent. Effective conservation requires scale-appropriate strategies. As remote sensing advances, opportunities for ring-necked pheasant habitat multi-scale assessment that fill remaining pheasant-habitat relationships knowledge gaps and support management decisions will increase.