Characterization of suburban areas for land use planning using landscape ecological indicators derived from IKONOS-2 multispectral imagery

Very high resolution satellite images are used to derive the spatial distributions of landscape ecological metrics within suburban areas. These indicators are weighted mean patch size and lacunarity computed from thresholded normalized difference vegetation index obtained from multispectral IKONOS-2 imagery. Spatial distributions of the metrics are derived for an extensive suburban area on the southwest edge of London, U.K. Weighted mean patch size and lacunarity values have also been investigated in subimages corresponding to different kinds of suburban land cover and with different box sizes. The results indicate typical ranges of the metrics in environmentally sustainable localities. The spatial distributions of the metrics provide new insight into landscape structure, which can be exploited in land use planning and in the construction of empirical spatial planning heuristics for sustainable urban development.