Beware of contagion!
Author(s)
Ricotta, Carlo
Corona, Piermaria
Marchetti, Marco
Date Issued
2003
Type
Article
Abstract
Landscape ecology starts from the assumption that diversity and spatial arrangement of ecosystem mosaics has ecological
implications and tries to understand the interactions between diversity and structure of large spatially heterogeneous areas
and its ecological functions. This approach implies effective use of earth observation techniques and geographic information
systems, enabling a global view of the landscape mosaics. Consequently, a large number of indices has been used to quantify
the structure of categorical maps as a surrogate of actual landscapes and correlate them to ecological processes. In particular,
the entropy-based contagion index has been extensively used to summarize the amount of clumping or fragmentation of
patches on raster categorical maps. However, despite its widespread application, the contagion index is very dependent on
pixel resolution. This effect may render it inadequate as a meaningful measure of landscape structure. To overcome this major
shortcoming, in this short note we propose to quantify pixel adjacency with a bivariate summary statistics that is not adversely
influenced by pixel resolution.
Additional information
L'articolo è disponibile sul sito dell'editore www.elsevier.com
Citation
Ricotta, C., Corona, P., Marchetti, M. 2003. Beware of contagion!. "Landscape and Urban Planning" 62 :173–177.
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