Assessing habitat suitability at multiple scales: A landscape-level approach

The distribution and abundance of many plants and animals are influenced by the spatial arrangement of suitable habitats across landscapes. We derived habitat maps from a digital land cover map of the similar to 178,000 km(2) Chesapeake Bay Watershed by using a spatial filtering algorithm. The regional amounts and patterns of habitats were different far species which occur in 'woody', 'herbaceous', and 'woody-edge' habitats. Habitat for finer-scale species (similar to 5 ha home ranges) was twice as abundant and move evenly distributed than habitat for coarser-scale species (similar to 410 ha home ranges) in a 11,000 km(2) sub-region. Potential impacts of land cover changes on habitats in different parts of the region were assessed by the frequency distributions of habitat suitability for smaller (similar to 3000 km(2)) embedded watersheds. The methods described in this paper can be applied to several scales of digital land cover data, and used to derive multiple-scale habitat suitabilities for a number of species or guilds. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.