In class this week we discussed landscape ecology and landscape metrics, this topic informed much of the background information needed for Lab 1 and Paper Review 1.
We discussed the importance of spatial analysis in understanding spatial patterns found within the field of landscape ecology. Additionally, there are two main components involved: processes and patterns.
Processes can be natural and incorporate biotic interactions and abiotic conditions, or processes can be a result of a disturbance. Disturbances can be related to human intervention/interaction or they can be naturally occurring. When investigating processes, scale must be considered in order to better understand how they are influencing the landscape.
**Fragstats is a powerful tool for exploring spatial patterns of landscapes
In addition to landscape ecology, a brief statistics review was provided. This portion of the lecture touched on basic statistical methods and metrics which are important to be familiar with when preforming different kinds of spatial analyses. It can be noted that when working with statistics in GIS there are two ways to address them: visually and quantitively.