Hawth’s tools, an extension for ArcMap, were used to calculate the number of cells of each
land cover value in each of the buffer zones (Beyer 2004). Hawth’s ‘thematic raster summary
tool’ takes input of a categorical raster layer and a polygon layer and outputs a dbf table with
cell counts of each category within each polygon (Beyer 2004). The area of each category within
each polygon was calculated by multiplying the count by the cell size squared (30m x 30m).
Since the area of each polygon was known (19,634,954 m2
), the frequency, in percent, of each
category within each polygon was calculated by dividing the area of that category by the total
area and multiplying by 100 per category, per polygon (table 2; table 3).