Effects of landscape fragmentation on land loss

Coastal Louisiana has been facing a serious land loss problem over the past several decades, and extensive research has been undertaken to address the problem. However, the importance of landscape fragmentation on land loss has seldom been examined. This paper evaluates the effects of landscape fragmentation on land loss in the Lower Mississippi River Basin region. The research hypothesis is that the higher the degree of fragmentation in a locality, the greater the amount of land loss in the next time period. We used Landsat-TM data with a pixel size of 30m×30m in 1996 and 2010 and transformed the images into either land or water pixels. We then calculated the fractal dimension and Moran's I spatial autocorrelation statistics and used them to represent the degree of landscape fragmentation. Four sample box sizes, including sizes of 101×101, 71×71, 51×51, and 31×31pixels, were used to detect if there is a relationship between fragmentation and land loss at different neighborhood (context) scales. For each box size, 100 samples were randomly selected. To isolate the fragmentation effect so that it can be better evaluated, we used only sample boxes with a 50% land-water ratio. Regression results between fragmentation and land loss show that the R2 values for box sizes of 71×71, 51×51 and 31×31 were statistically significant (0.20, 0.45, 0.35; p