Climatic conditions vary along the park’s elevational gradient, which ranges from 1350 to 3350 m a.s.l. Overall mean annual temperature is 15.6 ☌, and mean total annual precipitation is 2100 mm, with a rainy season between May and October. We studied oak forests in six geomorphological units: Tepozteco Mountains (TM), and four lava fields, namely Chichinautzin (CH), Suchiooc (SU), Otates, which is divided into lower (LO) and upper (UO) subunits, and Oclayuca (OC). It encompasses a complex territory including the Tepozteco Mountains, which are the result of eroded lahars, as well as a mosaic of lava fields with ages ranging from 1835 to >20,000 years old. We conducted the study in El Tepozteco National Park, located on the Chichinautzin volcanic range, ca. As it is freely available, Google Earth can broaden the use of remote sensing by researchers and managers in low-income tropical countries where most biodiversity hotspots are found. We conclude that Google Earth imagery can be used to estimate species richness in complex landscapes. However, Google Earth metrics emerged as poor predictors of all remaining vegetation attributes, whilst SPOT metrics showed potential for predicting vegetation height. Total species richness was the best-described and predicted variable: the best Google Earth-based model explained nearly as much variation in species richness as its SPOT counterpart ( R 2 = 0.44 and 0.51, respectively). We modelled each vegetation attribute as a function of surface metrics derived from Google Earth and SPOT images, and selected the best-supported linear models from each source. We measured basal area, vegetation height, crown cover, density of individuals, and species richness in 60 plots in the oak forests of a complex volcanic landscape in central Mexico. Further, we compare it to the potential of SPOT imagery, which has additional spectral information. In this study, we assess the potential of Google Earth imagery to describe and predict vegetation attributes.
However, such imagery lacks the near-infrared band often used in studying vegetation, thus its potential for estimating vegetation properties remains unclear. Google Earth provides a freely available, global mosaic of high-resolution imagery from different sensors that has become popular in environmental and ecological studies.
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