Harmonized Measurements of Spatial Pattern and Connectivity: Application to Forest Habitats in the EBONE European Project

Within the EBONE European project (¿European Biodiversity Observation NEtwork¿), fine-grained maps of harmonized ¿General Habitat Categories¿ are available for sixty 1 km2 samples located in Austria, Sweden and France. Three methods were proposed to map and assess automatically the spatial pattern and connectivity of habitats. They were demonstrated for forest phanerophytes habitats. Forest spatial pattern maps were obtained from mathematical morphology (GUIDOS freeware applying a 25 m edge size) to discriminate core forest, their boundaries, connectors between core areas and islets as small non-core elements. Landscape pattern mosaic maps were generated with a Landscape Mosaic Index to characterize the forest surroundings in a disk of 25 m radius. The two pattern maps were overlaid. A ¿Similarity¿ index was proposed to assess the pre-dominance of natural habitats (thus a similar/permeable forest ¿ non forest interface) and of anthropogenic habitats (possibly fragmentation due to cultivated or artificial land use) in the context of the forest boundaries, connectors and islets. Forest interior areas were delineated with edge sizes depending on the similarity with their adjacent habitats. Finally, two forest connectivity indices (one with CONEFOR freeware) were computed for species with 500m dispersal capabilities on the basis of habitat availability, matrix permeability and inter-patch least-cost distances. The two indices were compared.

ESTREGUIL Christine;  CAUDULLO Giovanni; 

2010-12-17

Instituto Politécnico de Bragança (IPB)

JRC61725

http://esa.ipb.pt/~jazevedo/ProceedingsIUFROLE2010.pdf,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC61725,