Morphological analysis of state and trends of landscape pattern

Pattern, connectivity, and fragmentation can be considered as key elements for a comprehensive quantitative analysis of digital landscape images. Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis (MSPA) provides an intuitive, repeatable, and scale independent description of image pattern structures, i.e., forest patches. Dedicated additional routines describe and quantify the connectivity network and the spatial fragmentation of the forest landscape. A morphological based change analysis aims to reliably detect coherent forest change areas by excluding uncertainties due to differences in image quality, ortho-correction, and classification accuracy of the input images. These tools and more are available in the free software GUIDOS Toolbox (http://forest.jrc.ec.europa.eu/download/software/guidos). The principal processing steps are explained and illustrated on synthetic and sample data sets. The reliable assessment of forest pattern and its change in time is a prerequisite for a meaningful understanding and interpretation of forest landscape dynamics. As an additional benefit it permits measuring progress in biodiversity and landscape planning projects. The provision of tools for monitoring and especially quantifying the impact of human activities on forest landscapes should facilitate the design of efficient and assessable forest resource policies.

VOGT Peter;  STROBL Peter;  SEEBACH Lucia; 

2014-12-01

Technische Universität München

JRC92793