Evaluating landscape quality with vegetation naturalness maps: an index and some inferences

Abstract

Question: Can landscape quality be evaluated and compared with a single numerical value using vegetation maps? Location: Northern Apennines (Italy), ca. 44° N,10–11° E. Methods: Seven phytosociological vegetation maps (1:25000), which correspond to man's different impact on mountain landscapes, were considered. Syntaxa were classified into five degrees of naturalness: urbanized, agricultural, semi‐natural, sub‐natural, and natural. Vegetation maps showing naturalness were derived in a vectorial GIS. The degrees of naturalness were ordered according to increasing naturalness. If c1 is the cumulative relative value of every mapped area of the degrees of naturalness, the sum of these cumulative values A =∑ ci is is a measure of vegetation artificiality. Its maximum value is Amax= n‐1. The Index of Vegetation Naturalness IVN = 1 ‐A/Amax, ranging from 0 to 1. Our IVN is an extension of the ILC by Pizzolotto & Brandmayr (1996) due to the ordinal character of the vegetation classification into degrees of naturalness. The maps of vegetation naturalness were also analysed by two known metrics for the evaluation of landscape quality: TECI (Total Edge Contrast Index) and MSI (Mean Shape Index). Results: The case studies show that IVN is linearly correlated with decreasing area of urbanized and agricultural vegetation types as well as with increasing area of the highest degree of naturalness. Conclusions: IVN can be joined with the TECI for the evaluation of naturalness of landscapes. TECI can supply additional information about the importance of landscape ecotones. Our case studies suggest that an urbanized landscape should correspond to IVN values lower than 0.20. A natural landscape will have IVN values higher than 0.80.

Using the natural capital index framework as a scalable aggregation methodology for regional biodiversity indicators

“…Having performed a thorough literature survey, we found several solutions for this, including three of presumably independent origin: the 'index of landscape conservation status' (ILC; Pizzolotto & Brandmayr 1996), the 'hemeroby index' (M; Steinhardt et al 1999) and the 'habitat hectares' approach (Parkes et al 2003). The recently proposed 'index of vegetation naturalness' (IVN; Ferrari et al 2008) is essentially a reformulation of ILC, whereas Gibbons et al (2009) apply a formula very similar to the habitat hectares approach for the 'regional value' of an area containing several vegetation fragments. Remarkably, even though starting out from fairly different backgrounds, the identified solutions all end up with methodologies that are computationally equivalent to the NCI concept.…”

“…Such fine-scale indicators (e.g. Ferrari et al 2008;Parkes et al 2003) are generally composed of (1) a site level indicator of local ecosystem state (e.g. its 'naturalness' or 'vegetation condition') and (2) an aggregation framework, both of which have applicability outside the regions in which they were developed.…”

Integrating the spatial proximity effect into the assessment of changes in ecosystem services for biodiversity conservation

“…In early studies, Westhoff (1983) classified vegetation types into four systems: cultural, seminatural, sub-natural and natural. Ferrari et al (2008) defined five degrees of artificiality: urbanized, cropland, semi-natural, subnatural and natural. Therefore, the five land cover types were arranged by their degrees of artificiality according to the abovementioned classification systems and the actual situation: urban, cropland, water, forest, and other land.…”

“…tive artificiality of land cover types was extracted from the relative artificiality of the vegetation (Ferrari et al, 2008) as follows:…”

The natural capital index of Hungary

“…On the other hand, there are several regions worldwide, where habitat maps with a quality attribute are already available: e.g. the Czech Republic (Guth and Kučera 2005), Victoria, Australia (Newell et al 2006), or the national parks of the Northern Apennines (Ferrari et al 2008). Furthermore, it is theoretically feasible to estimate NCI changes for larger areas based on monitoring only a stratified sample of natural ecosystems.…”