e analysis of landscape pattern to infer process is the underlying tenant in the field of landscape ecology (Forman and Godron 1986; Forman 1995; Turner et al. 2001). One’s ability to effectively explain ecological processes therefore depends on correctly representing ecological patterns. Landscape ecology traditionally adopts a patch mosaic model of ecological patterns, implicitly assuming discretely bounded and categorically defined patches are sufficient to explain pattern-process relationships (McGarigal and Cushman 2005). However, most ecological attributes are inherently continuous and classification of species composition into vegetation communities and discrete patches provides an overly simplistic view of the landscape and limits our ability to explore the continuous nature of plant distributions (Cushman et al. in press, McGarigal et al. in press; Evans and Cushman in press).