Activity-based measures of landscape fragmentation

Landscape fragmentation, which has demonstrated links to habitat loss, increased isolation, a loss of connectivity, and decreased biodiversity, is difficult to quantify. Traditional pattern-based approaches to measuring fragmentation use landscape metrics to quantify aspects of the composition or configuration of landscapes.

The objective of this study was to examine the relative improvements of an alternative activity-based approach using the cost of traversing a landscape as a proxy for fragmentation and compare it with the traditional approach.

One thousand binary landscapes varying in composition and configuration were simulated, and least-cost path analysis provided the data to calculate the activity-based metrics, which were compared with computed traditional pattern-based metrics.

Activity-based fragmentation assessments were sensitive to levels of landscape fragmentation, but offered improvements over exiting pattern-based methods in that some metrics varied monotonically across the spectrum of landscape configurations and thus makes their interpretation more holistically meaningful.

This study provides a modular conceptual framework for assessing fragmentation using activity-based metrics that offer functional improvements over existing pattern-based approaches. While we present a focused theoretical implementation, the process to be measured and the scale of observation can be altered to suit specific user requirements, ecosystems, or species of interest.