Statistics

  Once the map of new land cover has been generated, the ecologist or land manager can use the results to determine the impact of the policy defined in the Socioeconomic Model Module. As stated in Section 3.1, statistics are the only true metric for analyzing a stochastic simulation. They also provide a convenient method for understanding the impact of the particular land management policy or scenario. The statistics in Table 6 are collected by LUCAS for each time step.

The stack-based, non-recursive algorithm in Figure 5 is used to identify patches for statistics purposes. This method differs from the one used for patch-based transitions, because the statistics algorithm requires the entire map layer to be in memory at one time, which is not feasible for the composite map used in Section 3.3.2. This routine was originally developed by Gardner [11] and later modified by Minser [2].