Within BIOTA-East Africa the influence of fragmentation and human use on the biodiversity of East African rainforests is investigated following an interdisciplinary and integrated research approach. Especially when aiming at recommendations at the landscape level and including global change aspects, biodiversity research is in need of geo-spatial data. Here the BIOTA-East-GIS (see http://www.dlr.de/biota-east/biota/data.htm) serves as the common platform a) to link observations of the different subprojects via spatial information stored on natural and socio-economic variables, and b) to extrapolate or scale-up interdisciplinary findings based on field work in space and time. Remote sensing is a valuable mean to provide the needed time series of land use/cover change and intra-annual variations in biophysical parameters.