| Computing the Level of Fragmentation Present in a Landscape Using a Quadtree Approach
ABSTRACT
The amount of fragmentation present in a landscape is an important characteristic to wildlife managers, ecologists and others interested in studying the functioning of the landscape as a whole. However, quantifying the amount of fragmentation present in a landscape is highly difficult, because there are huge number of possible landscape configurations that exhibit what are functionally identical amounts of fragmentation. The result has been a large number of metrics designed to measure landscape fragmentation. All of these metrics are very similar to one another, but none is considered universally better than its competitors. From a GIS perspective, landscape fragmentation determines the size of a quadtree representation of a raster map. This implies that it should be possible to derive a measure of landscape fragmentation from a quadtree. This study will investigate the possibility of developing exactly such a measure, and compare it to existing landscape fragmentation metrics. |