MEASURING LANDSCAPE STRUCTURE USING GEOGRAPHIC AND GEOMETRIC WINDOWS

Characterization of spatial structure in the landscape is important fo r many types of landscape analyses. The Spatial Measurements Package h as been developed to facilitate spatial analysis of spectrally classif ied digital images. The software is unique in that it is designed to o perate on neighborhoods of ''patches'' instead of individual pixels. P atches are defined as areas of contiguous pixels assigned to the same class. A patch and its neighbors comprise a ''geographic window,'' the size and shape of which depend upon local landscape characteristics. The software permits computation of (1) average patch size, (2) standa rd deviation of patch sizes, (3) patch diversity, and (4) patch inters persion. This research presents the measurement of landscape structure using both the conventional rectangular geometric window and the prop osed geographic window on a classified image of northeastern Colorado. For most measures the geographic window seems to provide a better cha racterization of landscape structure than the geometric window.