Landscape analysis and delineation of habitat patches should take into account organismspecific behavioral and perceptual responses to landscape structure because different organisms perceive and respond to landscape features over different ranges of spatial scales. The commonly used methods for delineating habitat based on rules of contiguity do not account for organism-specific responses to landscape patch structure and have undesirable properties, such as being dependent on the scale of base map used for analysis. This paper presents an improved patch delineation algorithm, ‘‘PatchMorph,’’ which can delineate patches across a range of spatial scales based on three organism-specific thresholds: (1) land cover density threshold, (2) habitat gap maximum thickness (gap threshold), and (3) habitat patch minimum thickness (spur threshold).
PatchMorph ArcGIS10 Tool (limited tested beta version): download from here
Pubications
Multi-scale predictive habitat suitability modeling based on hierarchically delineated patches: an example for yellow-billed cuckoos nesting in riparian forests, California, USA, , Landscape Ecology, Volume 24, Number 10, p.1315-1329, (2009)
How to define a patch: a spatial model for hierarchically delineating organism-specific habitat patches, , Landscape Ecology, Volume 22, Number 8, p.1131-1142, (2007)