Assessing riparian vegetation structure and the influence of land use using landscape metrics and geostatistical tools

Riparian areas are among the most threatened habitats in the world, due to human activities and land use in adjacent areas. In this study we sought to identify landscape metrics for describing the spatial patterns of riparian vegetation affected by land use. We also hypothesize that land use in the immediate vicinity of the riparian area (considered as a 30-m buffer) can have a greater effect on the structure of riparian vegetation than that in an enlarged buffer (i.e. 200 m). The study was conducted in the highly humanized River Tagus watershed (Central Portugal; Western Iberia), along over 80km of river stretches. Riparian vegetation and land use data were obtained from high-resolution digital images (RGB-NIR 0.5m×0.5 m, spring 2005). Patch analyst was used to calculate landscape metrics related to the spatial configuration, isolation, inter-connectivity, and distribution of patches of three riparian cover classes (tree, shrub, and herbaceous). We quantified and accounted for the global and local spatial autocorrelation of data. Data treatment included redundancy analysis and geostatistic methods. Results showed that only a combined interpretation of various landscape metrics can consistently describe the spatial patterns of riparian vegetation. Riparian vegetation near agricultural areas (irrigation crops, rice fields, orchards, and vineyards), presented a low number of much smaller riparian tree patches with less complex shapes, and a low interspersion of the patch distribution. We found that proximal land use affects the structure of riparian vegetation more than distal land use – an important consideration for the establishment of streamside protection buffers info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion