Theoretical view of the Shannon index in the evaluation of landscape diversity

Abstract

The infiltration of water into the soil is a necessary parameter for irrigation systems design. Characterizing its spatial behavior allows a site-specific management of water according to soil conditions and crop requirements. The aim of this study is to establish the spatial distribution of infiltration in an Andisol by means of two geostatistical approaches: on the one hand by means of functional kriging, taking as input infiltration curves (obtained after a smoothing stage), and on the other hand by using classical ordinary kriging on the parameters of the Kostiakov and Phillip models. The comparison between these methodologies is carried out taking as a criterion the sum of squared errors of a leave-one-out cross-validation analysis. The results show a high correlation between observations and predictions (R 2 values around 99%), which indicates that the use of functional geostatistics in this context could be a good alternative. Moreover, from a descriptive point of view, we can point out that the contour maps of basic infiltration (BI), cumulative infiltration (Ci), saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks), and sorptivity (S) obtained with the observed data, as well as the predictions by functional geostatistics, show a very similar behavior, which empirically validates the use of this methodology.

The Relationship Between Landscape Diversity and Crops Productivity: Landscape Scale Study

“…The 300 m GlobCover Landscape Type Map, based on the two-month MEdium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) (Fritz et al, 2015;Ottlé et al, 2013;Pérez-Hoyos et al, 2017;Tsendbazar et al, 2015), was used as a basis for creating a landscape diversity map. The landscape diversity was evaluated using the Shannon diversity index (Dušek & Popelková, 2017). The landscape diversity may be calculated within each grid square using the Shannon (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) or Simpson (Simpson, 1949) diversity indices.…”

Impacts of climate change, agroecology and socio-economic factors on agricultural land use diversity in Bangladesh (1948–2008)

“…, where α j = area share occupied by the jth crop in GCA, and N is the number of crops. Higher value of index denotes higher diversity (Dusek and Popelkova, 2012). A value of 0 would represent a community with just one species (Beals et al, 2000).…”

“…Shannon's diversity index is frequently used in the determination of landscape diversity (e.g., Rahman, 2010;Benin et al, 2004) because of its indisputable advantage in obtaining numeric values that can be easily compared (Dusek and Popelkova, 2012). One limitation of Shannon index is its inability to express spatial distribution of patches within an area (Dusek and Popelkova, 2012) which in our case is not a major issue as we are using data at the regional level.…”

Landscape Analysis Over 30 Years to Assess the Impact of River Damming On Natural Ecosystem

“…Shannon's diversity index is frequently used in the determination of landscape diversity (Profile, 2017). From 1997 to 2003 and from 2008 to 2014, even though landscape classes increased, SHDI and heterogeneity decreased.…”