Abstract
What should the explanatory variable measure? In their discussion of scales of patchiness, Kotliar and Wiens (1990) defined grain as the smallest scale at which an organism responds to patch structure, suggesting that in GIS, identification of individual landscape components used as cues by organisms should be the starting point in habitat quantification since, at scales smaller than grain, the environment is perceived as functionally homogeneous. In line with this thinking, which reinforces our discussion of the importance of image resolution, innumerable studies have found individual species to be most frequently associated with specific structural subsets of the biotopes they inhabit.
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Keller, J.K., Smith, C.R. (2014). Explanatory Variables. In: Improving GIS-based Wildlife-Habitat Analysis. SpringerBriefs in Ecology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09608-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09608-7_3
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09607-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09608-7
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