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The influence of patch-delineation mismatches on multi-temporal landscape pattern analysis

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Abstract

Investigations of land-cover change often employ metrics designed to quantify changes in landscape structure through time, using analyses of land cover maps derived from the classification of remote sensing images from two or more time periods. Unfortunately, the validity of these landscape pattern analyses (LPA) can be compromised by the presence of spurious change, i.e., differences between map products caused by classification error rather than real changes on the ground. To reduce this problem, multi-temporal time series of land-cover maps can be constructed by updating (projecting forward in time) and backdating (projecting backward in time) an existing reference map, wherein regions of change are delineated through bi-temporal change analysis and overlaid onto the reference map. However, this procedure itself creates challenges, because sliver patches can occur in cases where the boundaries of the change regions do not exactly match the land-cover patches in the reference map. In this paper, we describe how sliver patches can inadvertently be created through the backdating and updating of land-cover maps, and document their impact on the magnitude and trajectory of four popular landscape metrics: number of patches (NP), edge density (ED), mean patch size (MPS), and mean shape index (MSI). In our findings, sliver patches led to significant distortions in both the value and temporal behaviour of metrics. In backdated maps, these distortions caused metric trajectories to appear more conservative, suggesting lower rates of change for ED and inverse trajectories for NP, MPS and MSI. In updated maps, slivers caused metric trajectories to appear more extreme and exaggerated, suggesting higher rates of change for all four metrics. Our research underscores the need to eliminate sliver patches from any study dealing with multi-temporal LPA.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Alberta Innovation and Science Fund, and the many partners and colleagues in the Foothills Model Forest Grizzly Bear Research Program. Julia Linke was directly supported by a NSERC PGS B scholarship and an Alberta Ingenuity Award. Jerome Cranston offered technical support in the gathering and organizing of relevant geospatial materials and Guillermo Castilla provided many vital comments to this work. We also thank three anonymous reviewers and Dr. J. Wu for their constructive feedback to this analysis.

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive N.W., Calgary, AB, Canada, T2N 1N4

    Julia Linke, Gregory J. McDermid, Adam J. McLane, David N. Laskin & Mryka Hall-Beyer

  2. Department of Geography, University of Saskatoon, Saskatoon, SK, Canada, S7N 4P3

    Alysha D. Pape & Steven E. Franklin

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  1. Julia Linke
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Correspondence to Julia Linke.

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Linke, J., McDermid, G.J., Pape, A.D. et al. The influence of patch-delineation mismatches on multi-temporal landscape pattern analysis. Landscape Ecol 24, 157–170 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-008-9290-z

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