LandScape Metrics (LSMetrics) is a free and open-source package that calculates landscape connectivity and other ecologically-scaled landscape metrics. It is intended to be used as a tool for environmental research as well as for landscape management, conservation, and restoration. It uses land use or binary class (e.g., habitat/non-habitat) maps to calculate metrics of structural and functional connectivity, edge-based landscape metrics, and landscape diversity indices. It incorporates edge depth and the capacity of organisms on crossing gaps between habitat patches to re-classify and calculate metrics considering the landscape at the perspective of different species and functional groups. Besides, metrics are spatially explicit and may be assessed at multiple scales.

LS Metrics was developed in Python 2.7 and runs within a GRASS GIS environment (currently, GRASS 7.0.x or newer). Here you will find a brief description of the program functionalities so you can quickly use it. We wish to make sure you can easily install GRASS, import your input maps, run LSMetrics and export or use its output in various ways.

If you have suggestions on how to improve this tutorial, feel free to contact us or open an issue.

Authors:

• Bernardo B. S. Niebuhr <[email protected]>
• Felipe Martello <[email protected]>
• John Wesley Ribeiro <[email protected]>
• Mauricio Humberto Vancine <[email protected]>
• Milton Cezar Ribeiro <[email protected]>

Contributors:

• Juliana Silveira dos Santos <[email protected]>
• Vinicius Rodrigues Tonetti <[email protected]>
• Renata L. Muylaert <[email protected]>
• Vanessa Ellen Wendt Campos <[email protected]>

Please cite LSMetrics when using the package in your work:

Niebuhr, B. B. S.; Martello, F.; Ribeiro, J. W.; Vancine, M. H.; Muylaert, R. L.; Campos, V. E. W.; Santos, J. S.; Tonetti, V. R.; Ribeiro, M. C. Landscape Metrics (LSMetrics): a spatially explicit tool for calculating connectivity and other ecologically-scaled landscape metrics. In preparation.

LandScape Metrics (LSMetrics) is Copyright, 2013-2018 by Bernardo B. S. Niebuhr, Milton C. Ribeiro, John W. Ribeiro, and Mauricio H. Vancine, under terms of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). This includes all software, documentation, and associated materials.

LSMetrics is free and open source software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the license, or (at your discretion) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details here.

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