ABSTRACT
Quantitative measurements of landscape pattern have been used in the field of landscape ecology for nearly a decade. This introduction presents the key concepts discusses in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book introduces two improved metrics of fragmentation and patch shape complexity for landscape ecology analysis of remote sensing images. The goal of this research was to develop improved metrics that are independent of characteristic variation in remote sensing data, specifically, spatial resolution, and most sensitive to actual changes in landscape pattern. In order to achieve this goal two major objectives were met. The first objective was to develop metrics that were sensitive to changes in fragmentation and patch shape complexity along various predictable gradients of change. The second objective was to develop metrics that behaved predictively with changes in spatial resolution while being most sensitive to various predictable gradients of change.
