Abstract
Remotely sensed data for Southeastern United States (Standard Federal Region 4) are used to examine the scale problems involved in reporting landscape pattern for a large, heterogeneous region. Frequency distribu-tions of landscape indices illustrate problems associated with the grain or resolution of the data. Grain should be 2 to 5 times smaller than the spatial features of interest. The analyses also reveal that the indices are sensi-tive to the calculation scale, i.e., the unit area or extent over which the index is computed. This "sample area" must be 2 to 5 times larger than landscape patches to avoid bias in calculating the indices.
Keywords
grain,
extent,
index
Citation
O''Neill, R.V.; Hunsaker, C.T.; Timmins, S.P.; Jackson, B.L.; Jones, K.B.; Riitters, Kurt H.; Wickham, James D. 1996. Scale problems in reporting landscape pattern at the regional scale. Landscape Ecology vol.11 no. 3 pp 169-180 (1996)