|
Spatial Configuration
In landscape ecology, spatial configuration describes the spatial pattern of patches in a landscape. Most traditional spatial configuration measurements take into account aspects of patches within the landscape, including patches' size, shape, density, Landscape connectivity, connectivity and fractal dimension. Other measurements are pixel-based, such as contagion and lacunarity. Together with spatial composition, spatial configuration is a basic component of landscape heterogeneity indices. See also * Patch dynamics References Landscape ecology {{ecology-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Landscape Ecology
Landscape ecology is the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems. This is done within a variety of landscape scales, development spatial patterns, and organizational levels of research and policy. Concisely, landscape ecology can be described as the science of "landscape diversity" as the synergetic result of biodiversity and geodiversity. As a highly interdisciplinary field in systems science, landscape ecology integrates biophysical and analytical approaches with humanistic and holistic perspectives across the natural sciences and social sciences. Landscapes are spatially heterogeneous geographic areas characterized by diverse interacting patches or ecosystems, ranging from relatively natural terrestrial and aquatic systems such as forests, grasslands, and lakes to human-dominated environments including agricultural and urban settings. The most salient characteristics of landscape ecology a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Landscape
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the physical elements of geophysically defined landforms such as (ice-capped) mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of land use, buildings, and structures, and transitory elements such as lighting and weather conditions. Combining both their physical origins and the cultural overlay of human presence, often created over millennia, landscapes reflect a living synthesis of people and place that is vital to local and national identity. The character of a landscape helps define the self-image of the people who inhabit it and a sense of place that differentiates one region from other regions. It is the dyn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Landscape Connectivity
In landscape ecology, landscape connectivity is, broadly, "''the degree to which the landscape facilitates or impedes movement among resource patches''". Alternatively, connectivity may be a continuous property of the landscape and independent of patches and paths.Fischer, J. and D.B. Lindenmayer. 2006. Beyond fragmentation: the continuum model for fauna research and conservation in human-modified landscapes. Oikos, 112: 473–480. Connectivity includes both structural connectivity (the physical arrangements of disturbance and/or patches) and functional connectivity (the movement of individuals across contours of disturbance and/or among patches). Functional connectivity includes actual connectivity (requires observations of individual movements) and potential connectivity in which movement paths are estimated using the life-history data. A similar but different concept proposed by Jacques Baudry, landscape connectedness, refers to structural links between elements of spatial struct ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fractal Dimension
In mathematics, more specifically in fractal geometry, a fractal dimension is a ratio providing a statistical index of complexity comparing how detail in a pattern (strictly speaking, a fractal pattern) changes with the scale at which it is measured. It has also been characterized as a measure of the space-filling capacity of a pattern that tells how a fractal scales differently from the space it is embedded in; a fractal dimension does not have to be an integer. The essential idea of "fractured" dimensions has a long history in mathematics, but the term itself was brought to the fore by Benoit Mandelbrot based on his 1967 paper on self-similarity in which he discussed ''fractional dimensions''. In that paper, Mandelbrot cited previous work by Lewis Fry Richardson describing the counter-intuitive notion that a coastline's measured length changes with the length of the measuring stick used ( see Fig. 1). In terms of that notion, the fractal dimension of a coastline quantifies ho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pixel
In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the smallest element that can be manipulated through software. Each pixel is a sample of an original image; more samples typically provide more accurate representations of the original. The intensity of each pixel is variable. In color imaging systems, a color is typically represented by three or four component intensities such as red, green, and blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. In some contexts (such as descriptions of camera sensors), ''pixel'' refers to a single scalar element of a multi-component representation (called a ''photosite'' in the camera sensor context, although ''sensel'' is sometimes used), while in yet other contexts (like MRI) it may refer to a set of component intensities for a spatial position. Etymology The w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lacunarity
Lacunarity, from the Latin lacuna, meaning "gap" or "lake", is a specialized term in geometry referring to a measure of how patterns, especially fractals, fill space, where patterns having more or larger gaps generally have higher lacunarity. Beyond being an intuitive measure of gappiness, lacunarity can quantify additional features of patterns such as "rotational invariance" and more generally, heterogeneity. This is illustrated in Figure 1 showing three fractal patterns. When rotated 90°, the first two fairly homogeneous patterns do not appear to change, but the third more heterogeneous figure does change and has correspondingly higher lacunarity. The earliest reference to the term in geometry is usually attributed to Benoit Mandelbrot, who, in 1983 or perhaps as early as 1977, introduced it as, in essence, an adjunct to fractal analysis. Lacunarity analysis is now used to characterize patterns in a wide variety of fields and has application in multifractal analysis in particu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spatial Composition
In landscape ecology, spatial composition describes the content of a landscape in terms of the number of different categories of elements existing in the landscape and their proportions. Most commonly the elements being measured are spatial patches of different types. Together with spatial configuration, spatial composition is a basic component of landscape heterogeneity indices. See also * Patch dynamics Patch dynamics is an ecological perspective that the structure, function, and dynamics of ecological systems can be understood through studying their interactive patches. Patch dynamics, as a term, may also refer to the spatiotemporal changes wi ... * Landscape Ecology References Landscape ecology {{Ecology-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patch Dynamics
Patch dynamics is an ecological perspective that the structure, function, and dynamics of ecological systems can be understood through studying their interactive patches. Patch dynamics, as a term, may also refer to the spatiotemporal changes within and among patches that make up a landscape. Patch dynamics is ubiquitous in terrestrial and aquatic systems across organizational levels and spatial scales. From a patch dynamics perspective, populations, communities, ecosystems, and landscapes may all be studied effectively as mosaics of patches that differ in size, shape, composition, history, and boundary characteristics. The idea of patch dynamics dates back to the 1940s when plant ecologists studied the structure and dynamics of vegetation in terms of the interactive patches that it comprises. A mathematical theory of patch dynamics was developed by Simon Levin and Robert Paine in the 1970s, originally to describe the pattern and dynamics of an intertidal community as a patc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
