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Comparing resource representations and choosing scale in heterogeneous landscapes

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Abstract

Every species experiences the landscape as a unique pattern of resource quality and heterogeneity. This subsequently affects aspects of life from the individual scale (fitness, home range size), to social group scale, up to landscape characteristics such as source–sink dynamics, connectivity and species diversity. Correctly characterising the quality and spatial pattern of resources is therefore key in modelling species’ persistence and spread. However, although many measures of heterogeneity are available for binary and ordinal landscape patterns, few are directly applicable to landscapes with a continuous description of landscape quality. Lacunarity is a measure of the structure of gaps in the landscape, first used to describe properties of fractal landscapes. We develop lacunarity analysis to allow the direct comparison of pattern in binary and continuous landscapes with differing mean quality. Using simulated landscapes with varying degrees of spatial autocorrelation and resource distribution broadly describing the spectrum of resource quality experienced by specialists and generalists, we show how the measurement of spatial pattern changes when different distributions are used to describe landscape quality. Our metric indicates the scale of measurement at which the pattern is most different from random, and thus informs the choice of scale for modelled processes in the model landscape, and the appropriate extent for landscape study. Our metric can be used to distinguish between any spatial pattern or resource description, from a simple parametric distribution for landscape quality to the variety of resources likely to be encountered in real landscapes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Central Science Laboratory, Sand Hutton, York, YO41 1LZ, UK

    E. P. Holland & J. N. Aegerter

  2. Department of Biology, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5YW, UK

    E. P. Holland & C. Dytham

Authors
  1. E. P. Holland
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  2. J. N. Aegerter
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  3. C. Dytham
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Correspondence to E. P. Holland.

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Holland, E.P., Aegerter, J.N. & Dytham, C. Comparing resource representations and choosing scale in heterogeneous landscapes. Landscape Ecol 24, 213–227 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-008-9300-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-008-9300-1

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