Fall 2005

The Center for Landscape Pattern Analysis

Kurt Riitters, James Wickham, Timothy Wade, and John Coulston are the founding fathers of the Center for Landscape Pattern Analysis. You won’t find much about the center on the Web, and you won’t see its name on an office door. This unique collaboration between two Federal Agencies and a State university is more about bringing people together to work on interesting problems in landscape ecology than establishing an official presence.

“Though strictly unofficial, the center has come to represent the primary source for nationally consistent fragmentation analyses,” says Riitters, who is also deputy program manager for the Southern Research Station (SRS) Forest Health Monitoring unit. “Our national-level clients include the Montréal Process, the H.J. Heinz Center, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). We are also involved in international collaborations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, researchers at the University of Lecce in Italy, and the European Commission’s Joint Research Center.”

Among themselves the team members have developed a supercomputing headhouse—an infrastructure based in hardware, procedures, and computer code that allows them to process landcover maps composed of tens of billions of pixels quickly and efficiently. The fragmentation information generated by the center can, in turn, be fed into other process models.

Examples of center collaborations at the national level include:

• Through Wickham, the center works with EPA scientists on models that predict the effect of landcover changes on water quality.
• With Elizabeth Smith at the EPA Regional Vulnerability Assessment Program, the team generates landcover data used to assess the future impacts of urbanization in the mid-Atlantic region.
• With Ken Cordell, project leader of the SRS unit in Athens,GA, the team has assessed the degree of solitude provided by wilderness areas nationwide.
• Global maps produced by Wade were used in the United Nations report,The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment,to illustrate the extent of human impacts on natural ecosystems.
• The Tennessee Valley Authority incorporates fragmentation data and techniques into the large area habitat models they use to evaluate reintroduction strategies for southeastern wildlife species such as the Florida panther and the black bear.
• The Forest Service Forests on the Edge study, issued in May 2005, used watershed-level summaries of forest fragmentation prepared by the center.

Riitters emphasizes that the center’s work is about adding value to the multimillion dollar investments others have made in satellites and mapping. “We are practical,” he says. “We don’t ask questions that require more and better data; instead we ask questions that the available data can answer, revealing patterns that are not visually apparent. It turns out that the answers are quite stunning.”

Back to Sometimes a Great Notion: Visualizing Forest Fragmentation