Landscape pattern and species richness; regional scale analysis from remote sensing

Concern about the future of biodiversity in the wider countryside is stimulating the development of methods for species and ecosystem monitoring over large areas. The objective of this paper is to explore the potential of remotely sensed data for measuring landscape structure as an important determinant of species diversity. Data from the satellite Land Cover Map of Great Britain, a land cover classification of Landsat Thematic Mapper scenes, were used to derive a set of simple measures of landscape structure within 2 km x 2 km tetrads for three vascular plant families. Results from a model to predict plant diversity from landscape structure alone proved difficult to interpret ecologically and highlighted the need to obtain data on both landscape quality and landscape structure.