Monitoring Environmental Quality at the Landscape Scale

O’Neill, Robert V.; Hunsaker, Carolyn T.; Jones, K. Bruce; Riitters, Kurt H.; Wickham, James D.; Schwartz, Paul M.; Goodman, Iris A.; Jackson, Barbara L.; Baillargeon, William S.

doi:10.2307/1313119

Cited by 232 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…The connectivity metrics provide a unique perspective on the potential habitat in the region, with information content that is more useful for management action or acquisition targeting than statistics on the extent, length or shape of specific corridors (see Calabrese & Fagan, 2004;O'Neill et al, 1997;Urban & Keitt, 2001). Recall that betweenness is a landscape metric that represents the fraction of least cost paths that pass through each core area, whereas closeness is a landscape metric that captures the distance to all nodes from each core area.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Connectivity Conservation

Crooks¹,

Sanjayan²

2006

477

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a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f oThe exurbanization process, particularly rural residential development, is reducing the amount of roadless areas and remote habitat across the nation, with implications for biodiversity and ecosystem integrity of parks and protected areas. The need for connecting protected areas via existing habitat centers, or relatively undisturbed core areas, is greater than ever as exurbanization expands. Our objective was to make use of nationally available data sets on roads as well as information derived from satellite imagery, including impervious cover of the built environment and forest canopy density, to identify core habitat of the northeastern and mid-Atlantic USA. The identified core habitat areas, which covered 73,730 km 2 across 1177 discrete units, were stratified in terms of land ownership and management, and then analyzed in a landscape context using connectivity metrics derived from graph theory. The connectivity analysis made use of a suitability surface, derived from the land cover information, which approximated the costs incurred by hypothetical animals traversing the landscape. We show that protected areas are frequently identified as core habitat but are typically isolated, albeit sometimes buffered by adjacent multi-use lands (such as state or national forests). Over one third of the core habitat we identified has no protection, and another 42% is subject to motorized recreation or timber extraction. We provide maps showing the relative importance of core habitat areas for potentially connecting existing protected areas, and also provide an example of the vulnerability of connectivity to projected future residential development around one greater park ecosystem.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Connectivity Conservation

Crooks¹,

Sanjayan²

2006

477

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“…A large number of metrics and indices have been developed to characterize landscape composition and configuration based on categorical map patterns ͑e.g., McGarigal and Marks 1995;McGarigal et al 2002͒. These metrics are used to analyze landscape structure for a wide variety of applications, including quantifying landscape change over time ͑O'Neill et al 1997͒ and relating structure to ecosystem ͑Wickham et al 2000͒, population and metapopulation processes ͑Kareiva and Wennergren 1995; Fahrig 2002͒. Arguably the major application of landscape structure metrics has been assessing effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on landscape connectivity ͑e.g., Fahrig and Merriam 1985;With et al 1997;Fahrig 1998;Fahrig and Jonsen 1998;Wickham et al 1999;Riitters et al 2000͒. Fragmentation is a complex phenomenon that can be seen both as a consequence of habitat loss and as a process in and of itself ͑McGarigal and McComb 1995͒.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavior of class-level landscape metrics across gradients of class aggregation and area

2004

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Habitat loss and fragmentation processes strongly affect biodiversity conservation in landscapes undergoing anthropogenic land use changes. Many attempts have been made to use landscape structure metrics to quantify the independent and joint effects of these processes. Unfortunately, ecological interpretation of those metrics has been plagued by lack of thorough understanding of their theoretical behavior. We explored behavior of 50 metrics in neutral landscapes across a 21-step gradient in aggregation and a 19-step gradient in area using a full factorial design with 100 replicates of each of the 399 combinations of the two factors to assess how well metrics reflected changes in landscape structure. Metric values from real landscapes were used to determine the extent of neutral landscape space that is represented in real landscapes. We grouped metrics into three major behavioral classes: strongly related to focal class area ͑nϭ15͒, strongly related to aggregation ͑nϭ7͒, and jointly responding to area and aggregation ͑nϭ28͒. Metrics strongly related to class area exhibited a variety of distinct behaviors, and many of these metrics have unique interpretations that make each of them particularly useful in certain applications. Metrics strongly related to aggregation, independent of class area, are particularly useful in assessing effects of fragmentation. Moreover, metrics in this group exhibited a range of specific behaviors, highlighting subtle but different aspects of landscape aggregation even though we controlled only one aspect of aggregation. The non-linear behavior exhibited by many metrics renders interpretation difficult and use of linear analytical techniques inappropriate under many circumstances. Ultimately, comprehensive characterization of landscapes undergoing habitat loss and fragmentation will require using several metrics distributed across behavioral groups.

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“…Similarly, there is a plethora of papers examining remote sensing applications to predicting presence of one species or a number of species individually (e.g., Cardillo et al 1999, Kerr et al 2001, Hepinstall et al 2002. Environmental assessment programs are increasingly linking remotely sensed imagery, digital elevation models, and field information to integrate descriptions of small-scale processes up to regional and global scales (O'Neill et al 1997). By calibrating remotely sensed multispectral data with ground measurements of biotic properties, habitat condition (e.g., biomass, percent cover, nectar resources) measured at sample points can be extrapolated across a large geographic region (Graetz 1990).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying Relationships Between Bird And Butterfly Community Shifts And Environmental Change

Debinski

Vannimwegen

Jakubauskas

2006

Ecological Applications

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Abstract. Quantifying the manner in which ecological communities respond during a time of decreasing precipitation is a first step in understanding how they will respond to longer-term climate change. Here we coupled analysis of interannual variability in remotely sensed data with analyses of bird and butterfly community changes in montane meadow communities of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Landsat satellite imagery was used to classify these meadows into six types along a hydrological gradient. The northern portion of the ecosystem, or Gallatin region, has smaller mean patch sizes separated by ridges of mountains, whereas the southern portion of the ecosystem, or Teton region, has much larger patches within the Jackson Hole valley. Both support a similar suite of butterfly and bird species. The Gallatin region showed more overall among-year variation in the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) when meadow types were pooled within regions, perhaps because the patch sizes are smaller on average. Bird and butterfly communities showed significant relationships relative to meadow type and NDVI. We identified several key species that are tightly associated with specific meadow types along the hydrological gradient. Comparing taxonomic groups, fewer birds showed specific habitat affinities than butterflies, perhaps because birds are responding to differences in habitat structure among meadow types and using the landscape at a coarser scale than the butterflies. Comparing regions, the Teton region showed higher predictability of community assemblages as compared to the Gallatin region. The Gallatin region exhibited more significant temporal trends with respect to butterflies. Butterfly communities in wet meadows showed a distinctive shift along the hydrological gradient during a drought period (1997)(1998)(1999)(2000). These results imply that the larger Teton meadows will show more predictable (i.e., static) species-habitat associations over the long term, but that the smaller Gallatin meadows may be an area that will exhibit the effects of global climate change faster.

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Monitoring Environmental Quality at the Landscape Scale

Cited by 232 publications

References 51 publications

Connectivity Conservation

Connectivity Conservation

Behavior of class-level landscape metrics across gradients of class aggregation and area

Quantifying Relationships Between Bird And Butterfly Community Shifts And Environmental Change

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