Modelling the susceptibility of pine stands to bark stripping by Chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa

Abstract

PREFACE and 2.0 UPGRADE INFORMATIONAs the authors of FRAGSTATS, we are VERY concerned about the potential for misuse of this program. Like most tools, FRAGSTATS is only as "good" as the user. FRAGSTATS crunches out a lot of numbers about the input landscape. These numbers can easily become "golden" in the hands of uninformed users. Unfortunately, the "garbage in-garbage out" axiom applies here. We have done our best in the documentation to stress the importance of defining landscape, patch, matrix, and landscape context at a scale and in a manner that is relevant and meaningful to the phenomenon under consideration. Moreover, we have stressed the importance of understanding the exact meaning of each metric before it is used. These and other important considerations in any landscape structural analysis are discussed in the documentation. We strongly urge you to read the entire documentation, especially the section on Key Concepts and Terminology, before ever running FRAGSTATS.We wish to remind users that we are not in the commercial software marketing business. We are scientists who recognized the need for a tool like FRAGSTATS to assist us in our research on landscape ecological issues. Therefore, we do not wish to spend a great deal of time consulting on trivial matters concerning the use of FRAGSTATS. However, we do recognize an obligation to provide some level of information support. Of course, we welcome and encourage your criticisms and suggestions about the program at all times. We will welcome questions about how to run FRAGSTATS or interpret the output only after the user has read the entire documentation. This is only fair and will eliminate many trivial questions. Finally, we are always interested in learning about how others have applied FRAGSTATS in ecological investigations and management applications. Therefore, we encourage you to contact us and describe your application after using FRAGSTATS.This release of FRAGSTATS (version 2.0) differs from the previous version in only minor ways. Several "bugs" have been corrected. The most important change is the added option to treat a specified proportion of the landscape boundary and background edge (instead of just all or none) as true edge in the edge metrics (bound_wght option). This fraction also is used as the edge contrast weight for landscape boundary and background edge segments in the calculation of edge contrast metrics. In addition, the convention for naming the output file containing patch ID's in the raster version has been modified to comply with DOS requirements on a PC (id_image option). Similarly, the output file name extensions in the PC raster version have been shortened and renamed to comply with DOS requirements and to avoid conflicts with ERDAS conventions (out_file). The Nearest-neighbor algorithm has been modified slightly to compute actual edge-to-edge distance (previous version used cell midpoints rather than edge).We hope that FRAGSTATS is of great assistance in your work and we look forward to hearing about your applications. A...

Using Sentinel-2 Multispectral Images to Map the Occurrence of the Cossid Moth (Coryphodema tristis) in Eucalyptus Nitens Plantations of Mpumalanga, South Africa

“…Model performance was assessed using the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) [39,44,45]. ROC is a graphical plot generated by the Maxent algorithm based on the AUC when model sensitivity is plotted against 1 minus model specificity [16,37]. Hence, the model was characterized as more accurate when the curve followed the plot y-axis when compared to the x-axis because it attained a higher sensitivity value than a specificity value.…”