Data from: A morphometric analysis of vegetation patterns in dryland ecosystems

Vegetation in dryland ecosystems often forms remarkable spatial patterns. These range from regular bands of vegetation alternating with bare ground, to vegetated spots and labyrinths, to regular gaps of bare ground within an otherwise continuous expanse of vegetation. It has been suggested that spotted vegetation patterns could indicate that collapse into a bare ground state is imminent, and the morphology of spatial vegetation patterns, therefore, represents a potentially valuable source of information on the proximity of regime shifts in dryland ecosystems. In this paper, we have developed quantitative methods to characterize the morphology of spatial patterns in dryland vegetation. Our approach is based on algorithmic techniques that have been used to classify pollen grains on the basis of textural patterning, and involves constructing feature vectors to quantify the shapes formed by vegetation patterns. We have analysed images of patterned vegetation produced by a computational model and a small set of satellite images from South Kordofan (South Sudan), which illustrates that our methods are applicable to both simulated and real-world data. Our approach provides a means of quantifying patterns that are frequently described using qualitative terminology, and could be used to classify vegetation patterns in large-scale satellite surveys of dryland ecosystems.

干旱生态系统中的植被往往会形成独具特色的空间格局，其形态涵盖与裸地交替分布的规则植被带、植被斑块与迷宫状格局，以及连续植被基质内的规则裸地间隙。已有研究指出，斑块状植被格局或预示着生态系统退化为裸地稳定状态的过程即将发生，因此植被空间格局的形态特征可作为反映干旱生态系统状态跃迁临近程度的宝贵信息来源。本文针对干旱区植被空间格局的形态特征开发了定量表征方法，该方法基于此前用于基于纹理模式分类花粉粒的算法技术，核心步骤为构建特征向量以量化植被格局所形成的形态特征。我们分别分析了计算模型生成的格局化植被图像，以及南科尔多凡地区（南苏丹）的少量卫星影像，结果证实本方法可同时适用于模拟数据与真实观测数据。本方法为量化以往常以定性术语描述的植被格局提供了可行途径，可用于干旱生态系统大规模卫星遥感调查中的植被格局分类。