Synergistic Techniques for Better Understanding and Classifying the Environmental Structure of Landscapes |
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Authors: | Brett A Bryan |
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Institution: | (1) Policy and Economic Research Unit, CSIRO Land and Water, Private Bag 2, Glen Osmond, South Australia, 5064, Australia |
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Abstract: | The desire to capture natural regions in the landscape has been a goal of geographic and environmental classification and ecological land classification (ELC)
for decades. Since the increased adoption of data-centric, multivariate, computational methods, the search for natural regions
has become the search for the best classification that optimally trades off classification complexity for class homogeneity.
In this study, three techniques are investigated for their ability to find the best classification of the physical environments
of the Mt. Lofty Ranges in South Australia: AutoClass-C (a Bayesian classifier), a Kohonen Self-Organising Map neural network,
and a k-means classifier with homogeneity analysis. AutoClass-C is specifically designed to find the classification that optimally
trades off classification complexity for class homogeneity. However, AutoClass analysis was not found to be assumption-free
because it was very sensitive to the user-specified level of relative error of input data. The AutoClass results suggest that
there may be no way of finding the best classification without making critical assumptions as to the level of class heterogeneity
acceptable in the classification when using continuous environmental data. Therefore, rather than relying on adjusting abstract
parameters to arrive at a classification of suitable complexity, it is better to quantify and visualize the data structure
and the relationship between classification complexity and class homogeneity. Individually and when integrated, the Self-Organizing
Map and k-means classification with homogeneity analysis techniques also used in this study facilitate this and provide information
upon which the decision of the scale of classification can be made. It is argued that instead of searching for the elusive
classification of natural regions in the landscape, it is much better to understand and visualize the environmental structure
of the landscape and to use this knowledge to select the best ELC at the required scale of analysis. |
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Keywords: | Landscape GIS Ecological land classification Environmental gradients Cluster Multivariate analysis |
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