Sensitivity of landscape metrics to pixel size

Abstract

Analysis of diversity and evenness metrics using land cover data are becoming formalized in landscape ecology. Diversity and evenness metrics are dependent on the pixel size (scale) over which the data are collected. Aerial photography was interpreted for land cover and converted into four raster data sets with 4, 12, 28, and 80m pixel sizes, representing pixel sizes up to that available on Landsat-MSS. Analysis of covariance was used to determine the effect of changing pixel size on landscape metrics. The results indicate that landscape metrics should not be dramatically affected by the change in pixel size up to 80m, provided that identical land cover classifications could be generated by sensors with different spatial resolving powers (e.g. Landsat-TM and MSS).

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