Predictability of bird community-based ecological integrity using landscape measurements.

A fundamental premise of landscape ecology is that finer-scaled local ecological integrity is directly influenced by larger-scaled land use patterns. Therefore, characterizing landscape patterns that are mapped from satellite imagery may provide valuable covariate information about average integrity “on the ground”. This conjecture was evaluated in Pennsylvania for 102 watersheds where land cover patterns were represented by an eight-category raster map that was based on 30-meter resolution LANDSAT TM images. For each watershed, a suite of conventional landscape variables was obtained (McGarigal and Marks, 1995), along with a “conditional entropy profile”, which is a new technique for quantifying landscape fragmentation pattern over multiple measurement resolutions (Johnson and Patil, 1998; Johnson, et al., 1999). Ecological integrity for each watershed was assessed from data in the Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas (Brauning, 1992) by computing bird community indices (BCIs), first based on songbird guilds only, then based on a much larger set of guilds that incorporated all species