SENSITIVITY OF SELECTED LANDSCAPE PATTERN METRICS TO LAND-COVER MISCLASSIFICATION AND DIFFERENCES IN LAND-COVER COMPOSITION

Calculation of landscape metrics from land-cover data is becoming incr easingly common. Some studies have shown that these measurements are s ensitive to differences in land-cover composition, but none are known to have tested also their sensitivity to land-cover misclassification. An error simulation model was written to test the sensitivity of sele cted landscape pattern metrics to misclassification, and regression an alysis was used to determine if these metrics were significantly relat ed to differences in land-cover composition. Comparison of sensitivity and regression results suggests that differences in land-cover compos ition need to be about 5 percent greater than the misclassification ra te to be confident that differences in landscape metrics are not due t o misclassification.