Surface Metrics
Content for Sunday, October 20, 2024
Now that you have a sense for describing point patterns using density and distance, we’ll move to descriptions of “patches”. Patches generally refer to areal data with categorical characteristics. Understanding the relationship between patterns in the arrangement and composition of these patches forms the backbone of landscape ecology and has much to offer other social and ecological questions.
Resources
Setting the Stage
Landscape Ecology: the effect of pattern on process by (Turner 1989) is one of the foundational references for understanding the key questions driving the field of landscape ecology.
Landscape sustainability and the landscape ecology of institutions by (Cumming and Epstein 2020) has some cool extensions of landscape ecology into key areas of environmental governance and managment institutions.
Parsimony in landscape metrics: Strength, universality, consistency by (Cushman et al. 2008) provides a critical review of the myriad of different patch metrics that have been developed and provides guidance for selecting which metrics to use in analyses.
Technical Details
The General Background overview of the
landscapemetricspackage introduces the foundation for analyzing landscape metrics inR.Getting Started from the webpage for the
landscapemetricspackage provides examples of a typical workflow.
Objectives
By the end of today you should be able to:
Describe the importance of measuring recurrent landscape patterns
Distinguish between patch, class, and landscape-level metrics
Implement patch metric calculations using the
landscapemetricspackage forR
Slides
The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.