Topic templateWelcome Fragstats users!
On behalf of the Fragstats development team of Kevin, Sam and Eduard let me welcome you to this website and the world of Fragstats. As you are probably already aware if you have come to this discussion forum, Fragstats is a spatial pattern analysis software program for categorical maps that has a 20+ year history of use in the field of landscape ecology. And while Fragstats doesn't compute every landscape metric that has been proposed in the literature, it is quite comprehensive in the number and variety of metrics that it does compute. However, if you want to propose and justify a new metric to add to the toolbox, please feel free to contact the development team with your suggestion.
While Fragstats currently focuses on landscape metrics for categorical maps (i.e., patch mosaics), there are lots of exciting potential additions in the making. In particular, one such avenue for development is cell-based metrics that measure spatial patterns for a user-defined neighborhood of individual cells without explicit consideration of any patch membership per se. This contribution would add to the existing hierarchy of patch-class-landscape level metrics and offer new and exciting ways to capture local neighborhood patterns. Another exciting avenue of development is the incorporation of surface pattern metrics based on the continuous landscape gradient representation of landscape pattern. Hopefully, with your support and interest we can see these possibilities come to fruition.
In the meantime, happy computing!
Development Team
