Map misclassification can cause large errors in landscape pattern indices: examples from habitat fragmentation. Ecosystems

Although habitat fragmentation is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity worldwide, virtually no attention has been paid to the quantification of error in fragmentation statistics. Landscape pattern indices (LPIs), such as mean patch size and number of patches, are routinely used to quantify frag-mentation and are often calculated using remote-sensing imagery that has been classified into dif-ferent land-cover classes. No classified map is ever completely correct, so we asked if different maps with similar misclassification rates could result in widely different errors in pattern indices. We sim-ulated landscapes with varying proportions of habitat and clumpiness (autocorrelation) and the