Landscape ecology, if not ecology in general, is largely founded on the notion that environmental patterns strongly influence ecological processes [32].The habitats in which organisms live, for example, are spatially structured at a number of scales, and these
patterns interact with organism perception and behavior to drive the higher-level processes of population dynamics and community structure [14]. A disruption in landscape patterns may therefore compromise this structure’s functional integrity by interfering with critical ecological processes necessary for population persistence and the maintenance of biodiversity
and ecosystem health [36]. For these and other reasons, much emphasis has been placed on developing methods to quantify landscape patterns, which is considered a prerequisite to the study of pattern–process relationships (e.g. [1, 23, 26, 33], and [34]). This has resulted in the development of literally hundreds of indices of landscape patterns.