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. 2021 Jun;12(6):1093-1102.
doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.13583. Epub 2021 May 3.

rasterdiv-An Information Theory tailored R package for measuring ecosystem heterogeneity from space: To the origin and back

Duccio Rocchini  1   2 , Elisa Thouverai  1 , Matteo Marcantonio  3 , Martina Iannacito  4 , Daniele Da Re  5 , Michele Torresani  6 , Giovanni Bacaro  7 , Manuele Bazzichetto  8 , Alessandra Bernardi  9 , Giles M Foody  10 , Reinhard Furrer  11   12 , David Kleijn  13 , Stefano Larsen  14   15 , Jonathan Lenoir  16 , Marco Malavasi  2 , Elisa Marchetto  1 , Filippo Messori  1 , Alessandro Montaghi  17 , Vítězslav Moudrý  2 , Babak Naimi  18 , Carlo Ricotta  19 , Micol Rossini  20 , Francesco Santi  1 , Maria J Santos  21 , Michael E Schaepman  22 , Fabian D Schneider  23 , Leila Schuh  11 , Sonia Silvestri  1 , Petra Ŝímová  2 , Andrew K Skidmore  24   25 , Clara Tattoni  26 , Enrico Tordoni  7 , Saverio Vicario  27 , Piero Zannini  1 , Martin Wegmann  28
Affiliations

rasterdiv-An Information Theory tailored R package for measuring ecosystem heterogeneity from space: To the origin and back

Duccio Rocchini et al. Methods Ecol Evol. 2021 Jun.

Abstract

Ecosystem heterogeneity has been widely recognized as a key ecological indicator of several ecological functions, diversity patterns and change, metapopulation dynamics, population connectivity or gene flow.In this paper, we present a new R package-rasterdiv-to calculate heterogeneity indices based on remotely sensed data. We also provide an ecological application at the landscape scale and demonstrate its power in revealing potentially hidden heterogeneity patterns.The rasterdiv package allows calculating multiple indices, robustly rooted in Information Theory, and based on reproducible open-source algorithms.

Keywords: biodiversity; ecological informatics; modelling; remote sensing; satellite imagery.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
The moving window technique for the computation of diversity indices in the rasterdiv package, redrawn from Rocchini et al. (2013)
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
The Ötzi area in the northern Italian Alps, used for building an ecological example of the application of the rasterdiv package starting from a Copernicus Sentinel‐2 image, represented by an RGB space in natural (red, green and blue) and false (near infrared, red and green) colours. Coordinates are in the UTM (WGS84, zone 32N) reference system
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
The first row of the figure represents the area under study, namely the Similaun glacier as a subset of the study area in Figure 2. NDVI is shown in the natural range but it was rescaled to 8‐bit before heterogeneity computation. Then, different metrics were applied: the Rényi's entropy index, the Shannon's H (corresponding to the Rényi's entropy with α = 1) and the Rao's Q. Coordinates are in the UTM (WGS84, zone 32N) reference system
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
The first row of the figure represents the area under study, namely the Val Venosta, a subset at a lower elevation with respect to the Similaun glacier of Figure 3, and thus with higher human impact. NDVI is shown in the natural range but it was rescaled to 8‐bit before heterogeneity computation. Then, different metrics were applied: the Rényi's entropy, the Shannon's H (corresponding to the Rényi's entropy with α = 1) and the Rao's Q. Coordinates are in the UTM (WGS84, zone 32N) reference system
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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