Sensitivity of selected landscape pattern metrics to land-cover misclassification and differences in land-cover composition

Calculation of landscape metrics from land-cover data is becoming increasingly common. Some studies have shown that these measurements are sensitive to differences in land-cover composition, but none are known to have tested also their a sensitivity to land-cover misclassification. An error simulation model was written to test the sensitivity of selected land-scape pattern metrics to misclassification, and regression analysis was used to determine if these metrics were significantly related to differences in land-cover composition. Comparison of sensitivity and regression results suggests that differences in land-cover composition need to be about 5 percent greater than the misclassification rate to be confident that differences in landscape metrics are not due to misclassification.