Supplementing Land-Use Statistics with Landscape Metrics: Some Methodological Considerations

Landscape monitoring usually relies on land-use statistics whichreflect the share of land-sue/land cover types. In order tounderstand the functioning of landscapes, landscape pattern mustbe considered as well. Indicators which address the spatialconfiguration of landscapes are therefore needed. Thesuitability of landscape metrics, which are computed from thetype, geometry and arrangement of patches, is examined. Two casestudies in a surface mining region show that landscape metricscapture landscape structure but are highly dependent on the datamodel and on the methods of data analysis. For landscape metricsto become part of policy-relevant sets of environmentalindicators, standardised procedures for their computation fromremote sensing images must be developed.