Landscape Ecology vol. 9 no. 3 pp 207-226 (1994) SPB Academic Publishing bv, The Hague

Current reseach suggests that metrics of landscape pattern may reflect ecological processes operating at different scales and may provide an appropriate indicator for monitoring regional ecological changes. This paper examinesthe extent towhich a 1/16 areal subset of the landscape using equally spaced hexagons can characterize the spatial extent of land cover types and landscape pattern (number of types of edges, patch shape complexity, dominance, and contagion). For 200-m resolution data the hexagon subset gives a reasona- ble estimate of overall landscape cover but may not be adequate for monitoring uncommon land cover types such as wetlands. For agriculture and forest, their proportion of the full landscape units is only outside the 95% confidence interval of the hexagon estimate of the time, whereas the proportions for wetland and barren areas are outside the confidence interval 11-34% of the time. The hexagon subset also does not appear to be adequate as the sole basis for monitoring landscape pattern. The values for contagion, dominance, and shape complexitycalculated on the full landscape units are outside the 95% confidence inter- val of the hexagon estimate 27-76% of the time. Other statistical analyses include regressions between full landscape and hexagon subsets, mean differences and standard errors along with tests on number of positive and negative values, and percent relative error of hexagon estimates