0000000000300234
AUTHOR
Carlo Ricotta
LaDy: Software for assessing local landscape diversity profiles of raster land cover maps using geographic windows
Landscape ecology starts from the assumption that diversity and spatial arrangement of ecosystem mosaics have ecological implications and tries to understand the interactions between diversity and structure of large spatially heterogeneous areas and their ecological functions. These assumptions imply effective use of earth observation techniques and geographic information systems, enabling a global view of the landscape mosaics. In this paper, a software, LaDy (Landscape Diversity Software), for computing Re´nyi’s local landscape diversity profile on raster land cover maps is presented. LaDy is based on the use of Merchant’s adaptive geographic window, which is designed to operate on a neig…
Assessing forest landscape structure using geographic windows.
Landscape structure, interpreted as indicator of functional processes, has become a main attribute of multiresource forest inventories, enhancing its value with respect to society needs. This approach implies effective use of earth observation techniques and geographic information systems to obtain a global view of the inventoried landscapes and to understand the ecological functions of large spatially-heterogeneous landscape mosaics. Landscape structure often reveal extremely complex patterns that can only be very roughly characterized by methods of Euclidean geometry. Conversely, fractals can be applied to adequately describe many of the irregular, fragmented patterns found in nature. In …
Beware of contagion!
Landscape ecology starts from the assumption that diversity and spatial arrangement of ecosystem mosaics has ecological implications and tries to understand the interactions between diversity and structure of large spatially heterogeneous areas and its ecological functions. This approach implies effective use of earth observation techniques and geographic information systems, enabling a global view of the landscape mosaics. Consequently, a large number of indices has been used to quantify the structure of categorical maps as a surrogate of actual landscapes and correlate them to ecological processes. In particular, the entropy-based contagion index has been extensively used to summarize the…
Informational analysis of forest landscape spatial heterogeneity
Summary Under the perspective of forest ecosystem management, landscape is interpreted as a functioning structure. From an inventory and monitoring operational point of view, such an approach implies wise use of geographic information systems and remote sensing techniques enabling a global view of the territorial mosaic. From a methodological point of view, landscape ecology theory may be used as the assessment framework. Remotely sensed data provide excellent opportunities for the involved analyses, using both vegetation density measures and spatial statistics. The objective of this paper was to assess landscape spatial heterogeneity using an analysis method based on Shannon's information …