Models are used more and more often to study the biodiversity of ecosystems. The modeling allows to use some parameters in order to predict others, such as the presence of certain species, evaluate population size, the habitat suitability or total species richness.
In particular, some simple measures of landscapes and land-cover could be considered as good surrogates of the potential species diversity or richness: this because in ecology the habitat diversity is associated with an increase of niche availability for the species (Kisel et al. 2011).
My question is what are the best and more powerfull metrics from output GIS analysis, in order to be used as good surrogates of landscape heterogeneity, and in partcular for functional heterogeneity for birds?
Dear Frederico,
i would like to point you to some work of Thomas Gottschalk to whom i worked with a long time.
We really had great success using
pland - percentage of landscape feature in a defined radius around a focal point/pixel
as well es SHDI - Shannon diversity of landscape features.
http://www.sfb299.de/SLICER
an "easy" way to implement the metrics in linear models can be achieved with http://www.sfb299.de/GEPARD
I you have questions of need advice for the programs please don't hesitate.
Regards,
Tobias
Thank You very much for your considerations. I downloaded the information. Really I think that Shannon diversity, fragmentation (using the Interspersion and Juxtaposition Index, IJI) and percent cover of land-use could represent the best landscape metrics, to use in animal distribution models (as suggested in SLICER web).
In the coming days I hope to read well about GEPARD program for models of wildlife distribution.
Thank You very much and Happy New Year!
Federico
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