Spatial modelling and monitoring of natural landscapes with cases in the Amsterdam Waterworks Dunes

The utilisation of geographic information systems and digital image processing techniques for the construction of digital landscape models necessitate for a reconsideration of the classical concepts for landscape ecological mapping. In this thesis, some methods are presented for the spatial modelling and monitoring of natural landscapes based upon digital workflow information.In spatial information processing, two major approaches for the conceptual representation of spatial features are distinguished, the field and spatial object respectively. A field is a feature which is contiguously distributed over space and time. The object approach, on the contrary, assumes that the earth´s surface is populated with spatially interacting discrete units. Because natural landscapes often show both continuous and discrete variation in space and time, a hybrid terrain description is proposed, denoted as ´spatial object with nested field´. In this hybrid approach the discrete landscape patterns are described by spatial objects, while the internal spatial variability within an spatial object is represented by a field.Classification is applied during the construction of the spatial objects and nested fields, because it is acknowledged to be a powerful technique to extract essential information from the background of infinite complexity. Crisp classification yields discrete attribute values and is therefore suitable for the definition and construction of spatial objects. The representation of continuously varying terrain features requires a continuous type of classification, i.e. fuzzy classification. Throughout this thesis, fuzzy classification is applied to construct fields.The concepts for spatial modelling, that were introduced above, were used in three cases resulting from the landscape management practice in the Amsterdam Waterworks Dunes:Spatio-temporal mapping of the vegetation structure from high resolution CIR-imagesTwo radiometrically corrected, digital colour infrared ort