Landscape Characterization / Forest Fragmentation / Quantifying forest fragmentation with indices
Quantifying Forest Fragmentation With Indices
Introduction
Scientists often use indices of landscape structure to quantify habitat
fragmentation. An index is a single number that represents some aspect
of landscape structure. For example, the ratio of the area of forest to
the total area of the landscape may represent the degree to which forest
may have been fragmented in the landscape.
Indices have been developed to measure three aspects of landscape structure:
1) the composition of the landscape, 2) the configuration of the landscape,
and 3) the shapes of patches in the landscapes.
Composition refers to the amount of different cover types found in the
landscape.
Configuration refers how patches of the same or different cover types
are arrainged in the landscape in relationship to each other. Landscapes
with similar composition can have quite different configurations (Figure
6). Therefore, several indices that measure different aspects of landscape
configuration are needed to describe a landscape. It should be noted that
some indices do not fit neatly into these three categories. The trick
to deciding on what indices to use in describing landscape structure is
to identify a small set of indices that describe the aspects of landscape
structure that are of interest, but that are not redundant in the information
they provide.
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