A Hierarchical Approach to Forest Landscape Pattern Characterization |
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Authors: | Jialing Wang Xiaojun Yang |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, Slippery Rock, PA 16057, USA;(2) Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA |
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Abstract: | Landscape spatial patterns have increasingly been considered to be essential for environmental planning and resources management.
In this study, we proposed a hierarchical approach for landscape classification and evaluation by characterizing landscape
spatial patterns across different hierarchical levels. The case study site is the Red Hills region of northern Florida and
southwestern Georgia, well known for its biodiversity, historic resources, and scenic beauty. We used one Landsat Enhanced
Thematic Mapper image to extract land-use/-cover information. Then, we employed principal-component analysis to help identify
key class-level landscape metrics for forests at different hierarchical levels, namely, open pine, upland pine, and forest
as a whole. We found that the key class-level landscape metrics varied across different hierarchical levels. Compared with
forest as a whole, open pine forest is much more fragmented. The landscape metric, such as CONTIG_MN, which measures whether
pine patches are contiguous or not, is more important to characterize the spatial pattern of pine forest than to forest as
a whole. This suggests that different metric sets should be used to characterize landscape patterns at different hierarchical
levels. We further used these key metrics, along with the total class area, to classify and evaluate subwatersheds through
cluster analysis. This study demonstrates a promising approach that can be used to integrate spatial patterns and processes
for hierarchical forest landscape planning and management. |
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