To Weight or Not to Weight, That Is the Question: The Design of a Composite Indicator of Landscape Fragmentation

Composite indicators (CIs), i.e., combinations of many in a unique synthetizing measure, are useful for disentangling multisector phenomena. Prominent questions concern indicators’ weighting, which implies time-consuming activities and should be properly justified. Landscape fragmentation (LF), the subdivision habitats smaller more isolated patches, has been studied through composite index landscape (CILF). It was originally proposed by us as an unweighted combination three LF study phenomenon Sardinia, Italy. In this paper, we aim at presenting weighted release CILF developing Hamletian question whether weighting is worthwhile or not. We focus on sensitivity to different algorithms combining patterns (equalization, extraction principal component analysis, expert judgment) aggregation rules (weighted average mean, geometric generalized mean). The exercise provides reader with meaningful results. Higher values signal that effort leads informative composites. Otherwise, high robustness does not mean worthwhile. Weighting per se can beneficial acceptable viable decisional processes.