During lecture this week we discusses the study of landscape ecology, which investigates how the structure of the landscape impacts distribution of certain organisms. We investigated how abiotic patterns & processes as well as biotic patterns & processes are all related to landscape structure. Ecology is impacted by spatial autocorrelation, is scale-dependent, and is spatially-dependent. For example, processes such as organism dispersal (a biotic process) across a region can create certain clustering patterns (spatial autocorrelation).

There are also different metrics in landscape ecology that can measure the subject matter and it’s distribution across a landscape. Some of these metrics include: relative richness, dominance, diversity, and connectivity. Spatial configuration can also be measured by probabilities of adjacency, contagion, connectivity, proximity index, or area-weighted average patch size. We discussed these in further detail the next week, during the lecture that reviewed spatial statistics.

It was interesting to hear some input from the GEM 511 students on this topic during lecture this week. Since they are in a Master’s program in the department of Forestry, they have a diversity of experience in landscape ecology and different exposure to relevant data analysis tools compared to many students in Geography.