The provision of tools for monitoring and especially quantifying the impact of human activities on forest landscapes facilitate the design of efficient and assessable forest resource policies and risk assessment studies. Status and trends of land cover objects can be described by their pattern, connectivity, and fragmentation. While there are many quantitative measures for pattern (McGarigal 2012, Soille 2008, Wickham 2010) and connectivity (Saura 2009, Saura 2011), fragmentation is usually provided as a qualitative description for a specific species living in the landscape under study. Yet, a meaningful understanding and interpretation of landscape dynamics in general requires a generic, reliable and especially quantitative assessment of fragmentation. This study will illustrate the concept of a normalized, quantitative fragmentation metric describing both, the overall degree as well as the spatial distribution of fragmentation of any categorical land cover type map in a digital raster image.

VOGT Peter; 

2015-04-13

Department of Forest and Wood Science Stellenbosch University

JRC95393

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC95393,