On parametric fragmentation measures
Author(s)
Ricotta, Carlo
Corona, Piermaria
Marchetti, Marco
Chirici, Gherardo
Date Issued
2006
Type
Article
Abstract
In the landscape ecological literature, a number
of measures have been proposed for quantifying landscape
fragmentation based on distinct objectives and
motivations. However, none seems to be generally preferred.
The main reason for this disagreement is that,
from a statistical viewpoint, by mapping fragmentation
into a single scalar, information is necessarily lost and
no ideal function is able to uniquely characterize all
aspects of landscape fragmentation. A more complete
summarization of fragmentation is possible if, instead of
one single index, a parametric index family is applied
whose members have varying sensitivities to the presence
of large and small landscape patches. While traditional
indices supply point descriptions of fragmentation,
according to a parametric fragmentation family Ha,
there is a continuum of possible fragmentation measures
that differ in their sensitivity to the presence of large and
small patches as a function of the scaling parameter a.
Therefore, changing a allows for vector description of
fragmentation. The purpose of this paper is to introduce
a parametric generalization of Shannon’s entropy to
summarize landscape fragmentation. A small set of
artificial landscapes is used to clarify our proposal
Additional information
L'articolo è disponibile sul sito dell'editore www.springerlink.com
Citation
Ricotta, C. et al. 2006. On parametric fragmentation measures. "European Journal of Forest Research" 125 (4): 441-444.
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