Abstract
Remotely sensed data for Southeastern United States (Standard Federal Region 4) are used to examine the scale problems involved in reporting landscape pattern for a large, heterogeneous region. Frequency distributions of landscape indices illustrate problems associated with the grain or resolution of the data. Grain should be 2 to 5 times smaller than the spatial features of interest. The analyses also reveal that the indices are sensitive to the calculation scale,i.e., the unit area or extent over which the index is computed. This “sample area” must be 2 to 5 times larger than landscape patches to avoid bias in calculating the indices.
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Research sponsored by the Office of Research and Development, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under IAG DW89934440-6 and DW89936104-01 with the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC05-84OR21400 with Martin Marietta Energy Systems, Inc.