LecoS - A QGIS plugin for automated landscape ecology analysis

Jung, Martin

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.116

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…A Landsat 8 raster was downloaded from the US Geological Survey and processed in QGIS with the SCP plugin (Congedo, 2016) to obtain a land cover map. Landscape metrics refer to the size, shape, configuration, number, and position of land‐use patches within a landscape and were obtained for the forest class within a 1,000 m diameter buffer zone around the plots with the LecoS plugin (Jung, 2013).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing the wood despite the trees: Exploring human disturbance impact on plant diversity, community structure, and standing biomass in fragmented high Andean forests

Calbi

Fajardo-Gutiérrez²,

Posada

et al. 2021

Ecology and Evolution

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High Andean forests harbor a remarkably high biodiversity and play a key role in providing vital ecosystem services for neighboring cities and settlements. However, they are among the most fragmented and threatened ecosystems in the neotropics. To preserve their unique biodiversity, a deeper understanding of the effects of anthropogenic perturbations on them is urgently needed. Here, we characterized the plant communities of high Andean forest remnants in the hinterland of Bogotá in 32 0.04 ha plots. We assessed the woody vegetation and sampled the understory and epiphytic cover. We gathered data on compositional and structural parameters and compiled a broad array of variables related to anthropogenic disturbance, ranging from local to landscape‐wide metrics. We also assessed phylogenetic diversity and functional diversity. We employed nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) to select meaningful variables in a first step of the analysis. Then, we performed partial redundancy analysis (pRDA) and generalized linear models (GLMs) in order to test how selected environmental and anthropogenic variables are affecting the composition, diversity, and aboveground biomass of these forests. Identified woody vegetation and understory layer communities were characterized by differences in elevation, temperature, and relative humidity, but were also related to different levels of human influence. We found that the increase of human‐related disturbance resulted in less phylogenetic diversity and in the phylogenetic clustering of the woody vegetation and in lower aboveground biomass (AGB) values. As to the understory, disturbance was associated with a higher diversity, jointly with a higher phylogenetic dispersion. The most relevant disturbance predictors identified here were as follows: edge effect, proximity of cattle, minimum fragment age, and median patch size. Interestingly, AGB was efficiently predicted by the proportion of late successional species. We therefore recommend the use of AGB and abundance of late successional species as indicators of human disturbance on high Andean forests.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing the wood despite the trees: Exploring human disturbance impact on plant diversity, community structure, and standing biomass in fragmented high Andean forests

Calbi

Fajardo-Gutiérrez²,

Posada

et al. 2021

Ecology and Evolution

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“…Edge density (ED), which is a shape configuration metric measuring the morphological complexity of the sealed soil patch patterns. It reports the edge length on a per unit area basis that facilitates comparison among landscapes of varying size (Jung ; McGarigal et al . ).…”

Section: Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Patch density (PD), which is a spatial aggregation index, defined as the ratio between the number of patches of a land cover class to the total area (Jung ). It is an index of the spatial distribution of the patches of a land cover class (Prastacos et al .…”

Section: Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

What Drives Built‐Up Area Expansion on Islands? Using Soil Sealing Indicators to Estimate Built‐Up Area Patterns on Aegean Islands, Greece

Kizos

Tsilimigkas

Karampela

2017

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

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The dispersion of built-up areas in peri-urban zones is considered an important, almost irreversible environmental threat, especially in coastal zones and islands. In this paper, we use soil sealing datasets derived from the European Environment Agency in order to estimate the expansion of built-up areas in the North and South Aegean islands in Greece. We examine these differences in relation to socio-economic features of the islands, especially tourism development, second home development and size and geographical position of the islands. The findings show divergent levels of soil sealing and a variety of spatial configurations, such as scattered growth of built-up land in coastal areas and peri-urban growth in rural areas. Higher cover of the total area of islands by sealed soil is related to tourism, but it seems that second homes are also an important driver, especially for smaller islands located relatively close to Athens. From a planning and management perspective, these findings can assist local or regional administration to assess the effectiveness of land use management plans and manage flows and processes.

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“…houses and buildings), permanent crops (olive groves, vineyards), pasture/arable land, complex cultivation patterns (heterogeneous agricultural areas with juxtaposition of small parcels of diverse annual crops, pasture and/or permanent crops), forest and scrubland. Furthermore, the LecoS tool for QGIS (Jung, 2013) was used to calculate: mean patch size expressed in square meters; mean shape index, a measure of patch complexity, where 1 indicates all patches are circular with values increasing as the patches become more irregular; and the Shannon diversity index, to account for the diversity of cover types. Using a 75 m digital elevation model, we derived 5 orographic variables for each transect length: average altitude, slope, northness, ruggedness and amount of solar radiation during January.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Factors shaping distribution and abundance of raptors wintering in two large Mediterranean islands

Panuccio¹,

Agostini²,

Nelli

et al. 2019

Community Ecology

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A growing number of ecological studies suggest that animal distributions are not only influenced by classical ecological features such as habitat availability, but also by the motion capacity of the studied animal. Here we analyse the diversity and density of two wintering raptor communities from Crete and Sicily, two large Mediterranean islands located along migratory flyways. We performed 611 and 1030 km of transects in Crete and Sicily respectively, examining the spatial distribution of raptors in relation to land use, topography, raptor species diversity and abundance. Our results show that community diversity and specific abundance are strictly related in accordance with the 'More Individuals Hypothesis'. Comparing the two most common raptors, the density of the Eurasian kestrel was the highest in Sicily and that of the common buzzard in Crete. An overall positive effect of Eurasian kestrel density on that of the common buzzard was found in both islands, but higher in Crete. Our findings suggest that the distribution and density of the Eurasian kestrel, because of its higher movement ability, are less influenced by the presence of ecological barriers along potentially migratory flyways. We cannot exclude that higher inter specific competition with common buzzards in Crete might have pushed the smaller species to cross the Mediterranean Sea in order to overwinter in Africa.

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LecoS - A QGIS plugin for automated landscape ecology analysis

Cited by 14 publications

References 5 publications

Seeing the wood despite the trees: Exploring human disturbance impact on plant diversity, community structure, and standing biomass in fragmented high Andean forests

Seeing the wood despite the trees: Exploring human disturbance impact on plant diversity, community structure, and standing biomass in fragmented high Andean forests

What Drives Built‐Up Area Expansion on Islands? Using Soil Sealing Indicators to Estimate Built‐Up Area Patterns on Aegean Islands, Greece

Factors shaping distribution and abundance of raptors wintering in two large Mediterranean islands

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