Measuring landscape structure using geographic and geometric windows

Abstract

Characterization of spatial structure in the landscape is important for many types of landscape analyses. The Spatial Measurements Package has been developed to facilitate spatial analysis of spectrally classified digital images. The software is unique in that it is designed to operate on neighborhoods of «patches» instead of individual pixels. Patches are defined as areas of contiguous pixels assigned to the same class. A patch and its neighbors comprise a «geographic window», the size and shape of which depend upon local landscape characteristics. The software permits computation of (1) average patch size, (2) standard deviation of patch sizes, (3) patch diversity, and (4) patch interspersion. This research presents the measurement of landscape structure using both the conventional rectangular geometric window and the proposed geographic window on a classified image of northeastern Colorado