Claudia Angiolini

The complex and fundamental task of monitoring habitat types included in Annex I of Directive 92/43/EEC and encountered in the Natura 2000 network requires a high level of expertise and knowledge for the classification of plants and habitats, plus the ability to move for hours in wild unstructured environments. Nowadays, this task can be carried out only by highly trained human operators. In this framework, the H2020 Project "Natural Intelligence for Robotic Monitoring of Habitats - NI" aimed at developing quadruped robots able to successfully and autonomously move in different habitat types, among which thermophilous beech forests (9110/9210 Annex I Habitats with Fagus sylvatica, Ilex aquifolium and sometimes Taxus baccata as typical woody species). Getting information on the floristic composition, structure, and presence of typical species of these habitats is an essential part of monitoring. The NI robot will help facing the two main challenges of environmental monitoring in these forests, being characterized by a stratification of vegetation in different layers: a) measurement of dendrometric (total coverage, diameter and height of tree) and other physical and ecological parameters such as slope, aspect, dead wood on the ground, and cover of herbaceous species; b) identification of typical species, such as nemorals and geophytes (indicators of a good conservation status of the beech forest), but also woody species.