Marsh Fragmentation Analysis

Landscape fragmentation is the “breaking up of vegetation or other land cover types into smaller patches that impedes flows of organisms, energy, and material across a landscape”. Landscape pattern analysis is the quantification of landscape patterns and their spatio-temporal dynamics. A variety of landscape metrics or indices have been proposed to measure landscape composition and configuration, most can be calculated in landscape analysis packages such as FRAGSTATS. Fragmentation will be assessed to generate both patch and landscape metrics. We applied FRAGSTATS analyses on the classified vegetation maps to determine spatial extent and temporal dynamics of fragmentation as a function of marsh area and riverine sediment supply.