LecoS - A QGIS plugin for automated landscape ecology analysis
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Environmental Sciences, Statistics
- Keywords
- landscape ecology, QGIS, landscape metrics, automation, Python, GIS, pollinators
- Copyright
- © 2013 Jung
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Cite this article
- 2013. LecoS - A QGIS plugin for automated landscape ecology analysis. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e116v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.116v2
Abstract
The quantification of landscape structures is an important part in many ecological analysis dealing with GIS derived satellite data. This paper introduces a new free and open-source tool for conducting landscape ecology analysis. LecoS is able to compute a variety of basic and advanced landscape metrics in an automatized way by iterating through an optional provided vector layer. It is integrated into the QGIS processing framework and can thus be used as a stand-alone tool or within bigger complex models. Finally a potential case-study is demonstrated, which tries to quantify pollinators responses on landscape derived metrics at various scales.
Author Comment
This version contains: A case study demonstrating the usage of this new introduced plugin; a new line to the abstract mentioning the case study; several new references
Intended to be submitted to PeerJ first.
Supplemental Information
The full QGIS model plus custom python scripts
The model can be viewed and edited in QGIS after copying the model file into the .qgis2/processing/models folder. The python scripts go into .qgis2/processing/scripts