Integrating time and the third spatial dimension in landscape structure analysis

Over the last decades, landscape metrics have been increasingly used to describe and analyse landscape structure. This article highlights some limitations of standard landscape structure analysis approaches and examines four major developments in this field: ways of integrating the height dimension of surface and vegetation into landscape metrics, the delineation of ‘meaningful’ landscape units comprising the relief, the problem of relating pattern and scale, and the challenges posed by the analysis of the temporal dimension of landscapes. We demonstrate that (1) the integration of height information and gradients into the approach of landscape metrics is both necessary and possible by means of using digital elevation models from remote sensing and novel analysis techniques, (2) the delineation of 3-D landscape units has enormous potential and (3) there are useful methodical extensions for two-dimensional objects in spatiotemporal investigations of landscapes, namely for analysing land use change and for exploring the interrelations between landscape diversity and species diversity.