Landscape Habitat Diversity

Measures of landscape structure are used to quantify landscape patterns and changes therein. These can provide spatial information about a specific land cover class, such as arable land, or characterise the entire landscape as a mosaic of land cover classes. Furthermore, they can quantify changes in land cover across temporal scales. Landscape structure measures describe landscape heterogeneity through the prevalence (landscape composition) and the spatial arrangement (landscape configuration) of the various land cover classes. A higher number of land cover classes increases compositional heterogeneity, whilst configurational heterogeneity increases with increasing complexity of their spatial arrangement. Both components of landscape heterogeneity influence the quality and quantity of food resources and habitats and are hence relevant for describing interactions between floristic/faunistic diversity and landscape diversity. This applies not only to the heterogeneity of the agricultural landscape itself, but also to the surrounding landscape matrix (OL), which provides food resources and habitats for species found within the agricultural landscape. Whilst (landscape) composition tends to function as an indicator of taxonomic diversity (e.g., of butterflies or wild bees), configuration serves as an indicator of species communities containing rare or endangered species. As specific measures, landscape structure indicators can summarise landscape diversity as a specific value for a given unit of reference. These can be compared with one another and related to ecological processes, and thus interpreted as biodiversity indicators – extending beyond the agricultural landscape. The landscape diversity indicators are based on data from the Digital Basic Landscape Model from the Official Topographic and Cartographic Information System (ATKIS Basis-DLM) and the listed land cover classes (Level 2, see ‘Basis of the survey’).