An ArcMap plug-in for calculating landscape metrics of vector data

Abstract

Landscape metrics are quantitative indices that describe the abundant information about landscape patterns and specific characteristics of the landscape composition and configuration. Landscape metrics have extensive applications such as land evaluation, ecosystem services, forest monitoring, urban sprawl control, and regional biodiversity conservation. Although numerous software packages, such as FragStats, Patch Analyst, etc., are available for calculating the landscape metrics, most of them process only raster data, while those applicable to vector data provide inadequate landscape metrics for calculations, making them insufficient for landscape analysis. The proposed plug-in can solve this task for ArcMap10.2 software called Arc_LIND, which computes the landscape metrics of vector data. This paper presents an overview of Arc_LIND, which can calculate three levels, six groups, and the total of 195 landscape metrics, including 13 ones at the patch level, 87 ones at the class level, and 95 ones at the landscape level. These features make it lucrative for the teaching and scientific research in the landscape ecology and other relevant fields. The comparative study on the scale effect of landscape metrics was performed using data in different formats and different landscapes, which confirms the feasibility and efficiency of Arc_LIND.