Assessing habitat suitability at multiple scales: A landscape-level approach Original Research Article

The distribution and abundance of many plants and animals are influenced by the spatial arrangement of suitable habitats across landscapes. We derived habitat maps from a digital land cover map of the not, vert, similar 178,000 km2 Chesapeake Bay Watershed by using a spatial filtering algorithm. The regional amounts and patterns of habitats were different for species which occur in ‘woody’, ‘herbaceous’, and ‘woody-edge’ habitats. Habitat for finer-scale species (not, vert, similar 5 ha home ranges) was twice as abundant and more evenly distributed than habitat for coarser-scale species (not, vert, similar 410 ha home ranges) in a 11,000 km2 sub-region. Potential impacts of land cover changes on habitats in different parts of the region were assessed by the frequency distributions of habitat suitability for smaller (not, vert, similar 3000 km2) embedded watersheds. The methods described in this paper can be applied to several scales of digital land cover data, and used to derive multiple-scale habitat suitabilities for a number of species or guilds.