February 1, 2020
To summarize landscape ecology, the study is meant to understand the mutual interactions between spatial patterns and ecological process that take place on landscapes, which can be used in a descriptive and prescriptive manner. It directly assesses the role that spatial heterogeneity plays in ecology. However, it is very important to first consider what the causes of any landscape pattern are and how the form of the landscape itself can modify natural processes before doing any kind of spatial analysis. Processes can be biotic (i.e. keystone species), abiotic (i.e. topography), and disturbance (i.e. patterns of land use and human settlement), meaning they can be considered either natural or human-made. Multiple processes can be apart of one pattern, making analysis quite complex because they can occur at different spatial and temporal scales. This creates a feedback issue between the two that makes it difficult to identify processes responsible for a particular pattern, and any one map identifies only one of the many possible patterns. In landscape ecology looking at the entire ecosystem is difficult, and thus, it is analyzed more as the sum of all its parts rather than as a whole.
Processes can also be spatially autocorrelated or stationary, defined as a either a first or second-order process for either category. If a pattern develops as a response to a physical environmental factor like slope or soil type it is a first-order autocorrelated process. If a pattern develops as a result of interactions between the events or objects they are a second order autocorrelated process. On the other hand, if the process is first-order stationary it means there is no variation in its intensity over space; and if it is second-order stationary there is no interaction between events or objects. If a process is stationary it is assumed that there is no directionality, making is isotropic, but spatially autocorrelated processes can be anisotropic, or directionally bias. This classification scheme can also be applied to other themes such as infectious disease.
Measurable metrics of landscape composition include: relative richness, dominance, diversity, and connectivity. This means that common configuration analyses often include: probability of adjacency, contagion, connectivity, proximity index, and area-weighted average patch size.