**7. References**


**13** 

*Sweden* 

**Landscape Environmental Monitoring:** 

Habib Ramezani1, Johan Svensson1 and Per-Anders Esseen2

**Approaches in Aerial Photographs** 

*1Department of Forest Resource Management, Swedish University of Agriculture Science, Umeå,* 

**Sample Based Versus Complete Mapping** 

*2Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Umeå University, Umeå,* 

Unknown land use premises are to be expected due to changing conditions, e.g. shifting land use priorities, climate change, globalizing natural resource markets or new products in the natural resource sector. As a result the need is obvious for accurate, relevant and applicable landscape data to be used in cause–and–effect analysis concerning changes in

The current land use strongly influence landscape structure (composition and configuration) and contribute to biodiversity loss (Hanski, 2005; Fischer and Lindenmayer, 2007). In order to consider current status and also to monitor trends within a landscape there is a need for reliable and continuous information as a basis for policy– and strategic – as well as operational decision making (Bunce et al., 2008). For this purpose, many countries have now established or are in the process of establishing monitoring programs that provide information on large spatial scale (e.g., regional and national levels), for instance, the National Inventory of Landscapes in Sweden (NILS) (Ståhl et al., 2011), the Norwegian 3Q (NIJOS, 2001), and similar programs in other countries, e.g., in Hungary (Takács and Molnár, 2009). A major concern in landscape monitoring at national scale is the large complexity and amount of data, and the consequently the labor need in data acquisition,

Description and assessment of landscape conditions and changes require relevant, accurate and applicable landscape metrics, which are defined based on measurable attributes of landscape elements such as patches or boundaries. The suite of metrics must cover both the composition and configuration of the landscape to have potential to detect changes within a

Calculation of landscape metrics is commonly conducted on completely mapped areas based on remotely sensed data. FRAGSTATS (McGarigal and Marks, 1995) is a frequently used software for this purpose. In mapping, homogenous areas are first delineated as polygons. Aerial photo interpretation is usually performed using a manual approach while some automated and computer–assisted approaches have recently become available (e.g., Blaschke, 2004). Important attributes in manual interpretation include tone, pattern, size and

**1. Introduction** 

environmental conditions (Ståhl et al., 2011).

database management as well as data analysis and interpretation.

given landscape or when comparing different landscapes.

