Landscape Metrics Explain the Ecological Susceptibility of Terrestrial Ecosystems

Abstract

This study examines the effects of the change in the shape of landscape patches, known as landscape structure, on ecological susceptibility, which is defined using the object-oriented method. The aim is to determine whether ecological susceptibility is influenced by the shape of the landscape patches in the southern basin of the Caspian Sea. The multivariate linear regression approach is applied to discover the extent to which the mean, median, and weighted average of the landscape structure metrics can explain the total variations of the ecological susceptibility. To determine the optimal models, an intermodel comparison is conducted using the Akaike information criterion. Sensitivity and uncertainty analyses were performed to determine how sensitive ecological susceptibility is to changes in the variables of the models and how they behave under varying conditions. The models (0.64≥r2≥0.27, p ≤ 0.05) indicate that the landscape structure metrics can be applied to predict ecological susceptibility. Examining the mean, median, and weighted average of the landscape metrics in estimating ecological susceptibility also reveals that the models made by the mean and median values have less uncertainty than those developed by the weighted average. The results show that the regularity or irregularity in the shape of the landscape patches and the degree of contiguity of the land use/land cover patches can significantly affect ecological susceptibility. Closed deciduous broad-leaf forest patches, closed mixed forest patches, and open mixed forest patches can be considered crucial land use/land covers to estimate ecological susceptibility.

Fifteen years of Landscape Online: Looking back at the development of an e-journal

“…In contrast to these new topics, the topic around ecosystem services becomes less significant, although a number of publications are regularly published in the LSI (Augstburger et al, 2018;Kokthi et al, 2021;Scolozzi et al, 2019;Wübbelmann et al, 2021;Zelený et al, 2020). Furthermore, a range of articles continues to focus on landscape structure and dynamics (Belda-Carrasco et al, 2019;Cieślak and Biłozor, 2022;Dekaraja and Mahanta, 2022;Flores et al, 2019;Giné, 2018;Istanbuly et al, 2022;Khoroshev, 2019;Oppermann et al, 2021;Schmalz and Kruse, 2019;Silva et al, 2020;Stoicescu et al, 2019), landscape vegetation and ecosystems (Botti, 2019;Carlier and Moran, 2019;Mustafa et al, 2018;Ojeda, 2018), landscape management (Buendía et al, 2021;Hanberry, 2022;MacDonald et al, 2020;Raatikainen, 2018;Siagian et al, 2022), and conceptual ideas in the field of landscape ecology (Helm and Buchroithner, 2018). In addition, articles address archaeological and sacred landscapes (Długozima, 2020;Puzdrakiewicz, 2020;Żemła-Siesicka, 2022), and landscape perception (Khaledi et al, 2022;Mazzocchi et al, 2019;Rodríguez Romero et al, 2019;Serrano-Montes et al, 2019).…”