Detecting and quantifying extended landscape structure with spatial co-occurrence surfaces

Abstract

The attribute adjacency matrix is a fundamental component of many metrics used to characterize landscape heterogeneity from land cover land use maps. Since it quantifies adjacent pixel class co-occurrence, it is unsuited to detect broader-scale structure in land cover maps. This paper proposes a generalization of the adjacency matrix concept by incorporating lag distances into class co-occurrence estimation. The spectrum of spatial structure is presented in the form of a spatial co-occurrence surface. These surfaces can provide a wealth of information on landscape structure including the size and spatial distribution of patches of a single class as well as inter-class spatial associations.