Complex number valuation of habitats and information index of the landscape mosaic

Abstract

Analysis of sustainability and diversity of landscapes demands methods that quantify the composition of the mosaic in different habitats. Habitats have characteristic components of value in the context of a specific landscape, such as economic and ecologic values. We suggest that vector valuation of habitats as a complex number is an interesting approach for developing tools and a conceptual framework that allows for a deep insight over the compositional problem. It is defined an information index for the mosaic related to its potential variability, a measure of heterogeneity, characterized by a set of values and the probabilities of their occurrence as events, or frequency of states of a dynamic system. Such a conceptual framework may help assessing composition scenarios of a landscape mosaic in the context of the equilibrium manifold of an idealized system. We exemplify with an application with ecologic and economic data relative to the region of Nisa, central Portugal