Are Shape Metrics Useful for a Geocomputation? CORINE Land-Cover Analysis Case Study

Since shape metrics emerged in the landscape ecology as a new tool for quantitative evaluation of a landscape, it has become easier for geocomputation methods in GIS to adopt theirs principles. Nevertheless, there are still different scientific opinions about the usefulness of shape metrics. The paper describes shape metrics application for Corine Land Cover 1990, 2000 and 2006 areas (CLC) analysis along with statistical methods and discusses its benefits and disadvantages. The main goal of the paper is to evaluate CLC dataset without including attribute or qualitative information into analysis using shape metrics calculation. Thus, only geometric part of the data has been processed. Twenty eight metrics have been used for more than 900 areas (patches) from CLC dataset covering Olomouc region. Metrics values have been calculated and consequently used for correlation analysis, principal component analysis and cluster analysis. The results of the study represent complex evaluation of CLC Level 1 classes using, fundamentally, only the shape of CLC areas (patches). The analysis results show that shape metrics are very useful to identify groups of landscape patches with similar shape.