Understanding factors that influence pattern metrics for monitoring landscapes

Conference · Wed Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 1994 · Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America; (United States)

OSTI ID:7022649

Hunsaker, C; O'Neill, R ^[1]

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1. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN (United States)

Since landscape pattern is relatively ease to measure with remote sensing techniques, it should be an effective tool for monitoring ecological condition. The way in which landscape pattern is measured is a function of many attributes, but three are especially important--data resolution or grain, geographic extent, and number of land-cover types. For 13 ecoregions in the United States we examined the behavior of landscape pattern metrics (dominance, contagion, shape complexity, and proportion of possible edge types) when the number of land-cover types is aggregated from 14 to 7. Data resolution was kept constant at 1 km[sup 2]. Behavior of metrics includes range of values, ecoregion with highest and lowest values, and ortogonality or co-linearity. The values of the metrics decrease, as expected, as the number of land-cover types increase, except for shape complexity which increased. The ecoregions with the highest and lowest values for a metric often were not the same for different numbers of cover types. These results will help with the design of landscape monitoring for regional assessments.

• OSTI ID: 7022649
• Report Number(s): CONF-940894-; CODEN: BECLAG
• Journal Information: Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America; (United States), Vol. 75:2; Conference: Annual Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting: science and public policy, Knoxville, TN (United States), 7-11 Aug 1994; ISSN 0012-9623
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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