Abstract
The research deals with the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). The MAUP is a common scale effect in geostatistics relating to how a studied territory is partitioned and to the ecological fallacy problem due to spatial data aggregation. We processed a biodiversity assessment using the Shannon index on a set of remote sensing data (SPOT 5) on the Ventoux Mount (Southern France). We applied the calculation on different geographical areas, with different sizes, shapes and spatial resolutions to test the effect of support change on the biodiversity measures. We proposed a method to aggregate the data at several imbricated scales so that the loss of biodiversity due to the spatial autocorrelation can be estimated separately from the MAUP. The concept of ‘pertinent’ scale is then discussed through two biodiversity criteria, a quantitative one (the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, which evaluates the biomass quantity) and a qualitative one (a species typology, coming from a supervised classification of remote sensing data and experts maps).
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Josselin, D., Mahfoud, I., Fady, B. (2008). Impact of a Change of Support on the Assessment of Biodiversity with Shannon Entropy. In: Ruas, A., Gold, C. (eds) Headway in Spatial Data Handling. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68566-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68566-1_7
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