LaDy: software for assessing local landscape diversity profiles of raster land cover maps using geographic windows

Landscape ecology starts from the assumption that diversity and spatial arrangement of ecosystem mosaics have ecological implications and tries to understand the interactions between diversity and structure of large spatially heterogeneous areas and their ecological functions. These assumptions imply effective use of earth observation techniques and geographic information systems, enabling a global view of the landscape mosaics. In this paper, a software, LaDy (Landscape Diversity Software), for computing Re´nyi’s local landscape diversity profile on raster land cover maps is presented. LaDy is based on the use of Merchant’s adaptive geographic window, which is designed to operate on a neighborhood of patches instead of a fixed rectangular neighborhood of pixels (the conventional approach in image analysis).