Understanding relationships between landscape patterns and processes: interpreting results from multiple spatial scales in real-world data sources

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Interactions of pattern and process across landscapes are complex and reciprocal, and understanding their relationship often requires the quantification of important spatial and temporal properties of heterogeneity. Much of the quantification of spatial pattern in ecology to date has focused on landscape metrics, values computed from two-dimensional raster images typically representing land cover or land use. These measures, however, are not a panacea for earth system science analysis, and their application is difficult, in part because satisfactory statistical and geographic context is lacking. Yet the imperative to understand patterns remains.