Activity-based measures of landscape fragmentation.

Context: 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.

Objective: 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.

Methods: 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.

Results: 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.

Conclusions: 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.