| This unit combines theoretical concepts of landscape ecology and biogeography with spatial analysis techniques from remote sensing and GIS to address landscape scale applications of critical importance to natural resource management. Students build understanding of the relationships between spatial patterns and ecological processes. The unit looks specifically at analysis procedures that can be applied to generate land cover and habitat maps, and explores spatial pattern analysis techniques in the form of landscape metrics that quantify pattern present in the landscape. The relevance of the spatial and temporal patterning detected is put into a management context by focusing on analyses of natural and human induced disturbance events and other forms of landscape change, and how the spatial and temporal data generated can be used to communicate vital information to a variety of different stakeholders, within applied decision making contexts.
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