Relating Diversity and Human Appropriation from Land Cover Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to analyze the relationship between landscape diversity and human land use by modeling land cover proportions as random variables, applying it to Mallorca Island data to explore ecological hypotheses.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel statistical approach to relate landscape diversity and human appropriation using land cover data, including distribution estimation and application to real-world data.

Findings

Mean landscape diversity varies with human appropriation levels

Supports the Energy-Species hypothesis

Supports the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis

Abstract

We present a method to describe the relation between indicators of landscape diversity and the human appropriation of the net primary production in a given region. These quantities are viewed as functions of the vector of proportions of the different land covers, which is in turn treated as a random vector whose values depend on the particular small terrain cell that is observed. We illustrate the method assuming first that the vector of proportions follows a uniform distribution on the simplex. We then consider as starting point a raw dataset of observed proportions for each cell, for which we must first obtain an estimate of its theoretical probability distribution, and secondly generate a sample of large size from it. We apply this procedure to real historical data of the Mallorca Island in three different moments of time. Our main goal is to compute the mean value of the landscape diversity as a function of the level of human appropriation. This function is related to the so-called Energy-Species hypothesis and to the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis.