Natural and revitalized grassy ecosystems as biodiversity refuges: on the abilities of remote sensing for their detection and study

Abstract The natural and revitalized on the place of former fields grassy ecosystems can be the refuges (places of conservation in natural conditions) for many types of rare plant species. Such ecosystems are of great interest for the environment exploration and management activities planning over many countries including EU and USA. Samara region territory demonstrates the residual nature of grassy ecosystems as a result of intensive agricultural exploration of virgin grasslands, located here at the past. Consolidative usage of remote sensing data and ground-based surveys is the common practice nowadays. This paper describes the possibilities of high-nature value grasslands classification in Samara Region using intra-annual time series of multispectral remote sensing data of medium spatial resolution with the use of spotted ground-based surveys. Investigations engage the training set generation for the large natural vegetation communities with ground-based survey optimization and include the classification results for two vast grassland objects with protected status.