ABSTRACT
The most common method for quantifying landscape patterns is to capture information of a particular spatial pattern into a single variable. Such variables are commonly referred to as landscape metrics or landscape indexes. First of all, we define diversity of a landscape as the total number of landcover types. There are a number of terms and concepts related to landscape metrics and remote sensing that need to be defined before discussing landscape ecology metrics. The EPA ranked the status of a number of landscape metrics into one of three categories: for use as watershed integrity indicators; landscape stability and resilience indicators: and biotic integrity and diversity indicators. It is demonstrated that even in cases where Contagion is not affected by the number of pixels, spatial resolution, number of classes, or raster orientation, there can be many instances where the Contagion metric does not measure contagion.
