Abstract
The choice of grain (or resolution) for a landscape study will affect the findings of ecological investigations, so the grain adopted must be explicitly stated. However, stating the grain of the spatial data structure representing a landscape can be difficult as a variety of continuous tessellations or graphs of different regular and irregular geometries can be used. We demonstrate how spatial point process intensity (or density) can be used to define the grain of landscape tessellations and graphs with a variety of geometries. To illustrate this novel approach, we used analyses of radio-telemetry data for the brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) on the North Island of New Zealand to produce point patterns of differing intensities to create a continuous landscape tessellation and graph at different spatio-temporal scales. In doing so we highlight how point process intensity can provide a general way of reporting the grain of landscape tessellations and graphs. Therefore, this approach may facilitate communication of grain and so aid interpretation of ecological investigations and facilitate comparisons between studies.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Dean Anderson, Phil Cowan, Todd Dennis, Roger Pech, and Dave Ramsey for kindly providing the possum radio-telemetry data. The New Zealand Government provided funding for TRE as a New Zealand International Doctoral Research Scholarship. GLWP was based at Harvard Forest with the support of a Charles Bullard Fellowship during the writing of this paper.
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Etherington, T.R., Perry, G.L.W. Using point process intensity to establish the spatio-temporal grain of continuous landscape tessellations and graphs. Landscape Ecol 27, 1083–1090 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-012-9789-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-012-9789-1