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- Info
Assessing habitat suitability at multiple scales: a landscape-level approach
| Author: |
Riitters, K.H.; O'Neill, R.V.; Jones, K.B. |
| Date: |
1997 |
| Periodical: |
Biological Conservation |
| Link: |
http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/ja/ja_riitters004.pdf
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| Abstract: |
The distribution and abundance of many plants and animals are influenced by the spatial arrangement of suitable habitats across landscapes. We derived habitat maps from a digital land cover map of the ~178,000 km2 Chesapeake Bay Watershed by using a spatial filtering algorithm. The regional amounts and patterns of habitats were different for species which occur in 'woody', 'herbaceous', and 'woody-edge' habitats. Habitat for finer-scale species (~5 ha home range) was twice as abundant and more evenly distributed than habitat for coarser-scale species (~410 ha home ranges) in a 11,000 km2 sub-region. Potential impacts of land cover changes on habitats in different parts of the region were assessed by the frequency distributions of habitat suitability for smaller (~3000 km2) embedded watersheds. The methods described in this paper can be applied to several scales of digital land cover data, and used to derive multiple-scale habitat suitabilities for a number of species or guilds. |
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