Spatio-ecological complexity measures in GRASS GIS

24 Good estimates of ecosystem complexity are essential for a number 25 of ecological tasks: from biodiversity estimation, to forest structure 26 variable retrieval, to feature extraction by edge detection and genera27 tion of multifractal surface as neutral models for e.g. feature change 28 assessment. Hence, measuring ecological complexity over space be29 comes crucial in macroecology and geography. Many geospatial tools 30 have been advocated in spatial ecology to estimate ecosystem com31 plexity and its changes over space and time. Among these tools, free 32 and open source options especially o er opportunities to guarantee 33 the robustness of algorithms and reproducibility. In this paper we will 34 summarize the most straightforward measures of spatial complexity 35