A Novel Method for Measuring Landscape Heterogeneity Changes

In this letter, we present a novel efficient automated tracing algorithm, called Compound Ray Recorder (CRR), to measure landscape heterogeneity efficiently without any supporting data sets. The main advantages of this method are: 1) the definition of a unified calculation framework for landscape heterogeneity is proposed and 2) no ancillary data are required, and the whole procedure can be automatically performed without any expert support or subjective evaluation. The results of tests using the proposed CRR method with actual satellite data show that it can accurately quantify the level of heterogeneity of a variety of landscapes. By normalizing the image size, the method constructs a unified framework for comparison of different regions or image extents. Meanwhile, the CRR method has been applied to time-series tracing of urban expansion and seasonal changes in the Poyang Lake area, thereby providing a new approach for monitoring landscape changes. Furthermore, heterogeneity changes mapping, and quantitative comparisons between the proposed method and existing methods are also performed.