A functional perspective on the analysis of land use and land cover data in ecology
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PERSPECTIVE
A functional perspective on the analysis of land use and land cover data in ecology Federico Riva
, Scott E. Nielsen
Received: 27 June 2020 / Revised: 24 September 2020 / Accepted: 2 November 2020
Abstract Assessments of large-scale changes in habitat are a priority for management and conservation. Traditional approaches use land use and land cover data (LULC) that focus mostly on ‘‘structural’’ properties of landscapes, rather than ‘‘functional’’ properties related to specific ecological processes. Here, we contend that designing functional analyses of LULC can provide important and complementary information to traditional, structural analyses. We substantiate this perspective with an example of functional changes in habitat due to industrial anthropogenic footprints in Alberta’s boreal forest, where there has been little overall forest loss (* 6% structural change), but high levels of functional change (up to 93% functional change) for species’ habitat, biodiversity, and wildfire ignition. We discuss the methods needed to achieve functional LULC analyses, when they are most appropriate to add to structural assessments, and conclude by providing recommendations for analyses of LULC in a future of increasingly high-resolution, dynamic remote sensing data. Keywords Functional landscape analyses Geographic information systems Remote sensing Scale of analysis Scale of phenomenon Scale of sampling
INTRODUCTION Understanding the consequences of human activities is one of the most pressing challenges to protecting and managing Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-020-01434-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
natural resources in the twenty-first century (Soule´ 1985; Kareiva and Marvier 2012). Today, anthropogenic disturbances dominate ecosystems, eroding biodiversity and affecting several other ecosystem services (Newbold et al. 2015; Crooks et al. 2017; Daskalova et al. 2020). As a result, ecologists, managers, and policy makers are often required to evaluate changes in habitat across large regions of the Earth. This has been traditionally achieved by assessing changes in land use and land cover data (LULC), using remote sensing tools (O’Neill et al. 1988; Riitters et al. 2004). Owing to technological and statistical developments, LULC are now available at unprecedented broad scales (e.g., global; Tuanmu and Jetz 2014) and high resolutions (e.g., 1-m resolution; Wickham and Riitters 2019). Use of these products has revealed important patterns and trends: for instance, deforestation occurs consistently across the tropics (Taubert et al. 2018), taxa inhabiting fragmented regions suffer increased extinction risks (Crooks et al. 2017), and most of the world’s forests are proximal to edges (Haddad et al. 2015). While increasing availability and quality of LULC data contributed to the establishment of landscape ecology, macroecology, and conservation planning as cornerstones in the environmental
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