Potential for the wider application of national forest inventories to estimate the contagion metric for landscapes.

National forest inventories (NFIs) have traditionally been designed to assess the production value of forests as well as forest biodiversity. However, in this study, the aim is to show a new application of NFIs, namely the estimation of the landscape metric contagion. This metric is commonly calculated on raster-based land cover/use maps.

A comparison of two procedures to estimate three basic monitoring landscape metrics for monitoring.

An interesting alternative to wall-to-wall mapping approaches for the estimation of landscape metrics is to use sampling. Sample-based approaches are cost-efficient, and measurement errors can be reduced considerably. The previous efforts of sample-based estimation of landscape metrics have mainly been focused on data collection methods, but in this study, we consider two estimation procedures.

Monitoring landscape metrics by point sampling: accuracy in estimating Shannon's diversity and edge density.

Environmental monitoring of landscapes is of increasing interest. To quantify landscape patterns, a number of metrics are used, of which Shannon's diversity, edge length, and density are studied here. As an alternative to complete mapping, point sampling was applied to estimate the metrics for already mapped landscapes selected from the National Inventory of Landscapes in Sweden (NILS).