Neutral models for patchy landscapes

Preface to the selected papers on spatially explicit landscape modelling: Current practices and challenges

“…We have mentioned some of the works dealing with these discontinuous landscapes made up from uniform patches with distinct, well-defined borders (Forman and Godron, 1981;Kotliar and Wiens, 1990;Wu and Levin, 1994). As seen from the literature, especially with regard to neutral landscape models (Gaucherel et al, 2006a;Le Ber et al, 2009), the continuity or discontinuity of a landscape cannot be modelled in the same way. (b) Undoubtedly the most interesting aspect of landscape models is to try to reproduce the dynamics they host.…”

“…Unlike explicit landscape models that would simulate dynamic functions and relations of landscape elements, these models do not try to reproduce the spatial patterns of any given real landscape. Neutral models deal more particularly with one of the characteristics of composition and configuration of real landscapes (With and King, 1997;Gaucherel et al, 2006a).…”

Neutral modelling of agricultural landscapes by tessellation methods—Application for gene flow simulation

“…In [19], a Gibbs process is introduced to model the interactions between pairs of neighbouring patches. According to the parameter values of this model, the landscape mosaic can be more or less heterogeneous.…”

“…Fractal models have also been used [22]. More recently, polygonal approaches, using geometrical tessellations, have been proposed to simulate patchy landscapes [19,18].…”

“…However, as mentioned by [20], agricultural landscapes cannot be easily simulated with traditional ecological neutral landscape models for two reasons: (1) they are mainly geometrical, contrarily to less anthropogenic landscapes, and (2) in traditional landscape models, the basic unit is the pixel, and the land-use mosaic (i.e., both the configuration and the composition) only emerges as a result of the simulation (e.g., [48]), whereas in agricultural landscapes, the field pattern is generally stable and "precedes" the land-use. For handling geometric patches as basic units, a straightforward way is to use tessellation methods, such as proposed by [6] or [19]. However, various tessellation methods are available, that result in somewhat different geometries.…”