Pattern and error in landscape ecology: A commentary

✍ Scribed by George Hess

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1994
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 239 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0921-2973
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00135074

✦ Synopsis

Familiarity with landscape ecology and the concepts it represents is no longer restricted to a small group of scientists. Rather, landscape ecology is entering the mainstream of academic and political awareness. The term "landscape management" is now commonly used in conservation and government circles, often in conjunction with politically and emotionally charged topics such as biodiversity, conservation, global change, and sustainable development. At the same time, increased availability of remotely sensed data and geographic information systems (GIS) has brought landscape-scale concepts to life in a multitude of thematic maps. Various government and private organizations are spending large sums of money acquiring and classifying remotely-sensed data to produce land use, land cover, and other thematic GIS databases. Analyses of these data will be used to make landscape management decisions that will affect all of us, as well as many other organisms. While remote sensing and GIS have the potential to further our understanding of broad-scale landscapes, they have limitations that must be considered.

In this commentary, I raise the issue of classification error in thematic GIS representations of remotely-sensed data. Landscape ecologists have been using such data to calculate measures of broadscale landscape pattern, but have devoted no effort to quantifying the uncertainty in these measures. Yet without statistical confidence in the measures used, scientists cannot evaluate correlations between landscape pattern and ecological processes.