Today’s topic was ways to quantify landscapes in spatial analysis. Landscapes are impacted by a wide variety of forces. There is a concept in landscape ecology of how “form influences process and process influences form”. For example, this could mean how a forest fire (process) can change the landscape by removing stabilizing tree roots that lead to landslides and rotational slumps (form). This creates a constant feedback loop where the state of a landscape is always in flux. As a result, any given map is merely a snapshot of one of the possible patterns that might have emerged from a process.

One type of landscape metric is spatial autocorrelation, which is divided into first and second order processes. A first order process would be where patterns develop in response to some underlying environmental factor, while a second order process is when patterns emerged as interactions between objects.

Stationarity is another important metric, and is a measurement of to what degree processes may shift over changes in space. This implies a lack of directional bias, meaning that these processes are isotropic.

Patterns themselves have 5 classes of metrics into which they are categorized:

number of classes or cover types

texture measures

degree to which patches are compact or dissected

whether patches are linear or planar

whether patch perimeters are simple or complicated in shape