US-IALE 2018

AUTHORS: Yun Zhao*, Peter Kedron, Amy Frazier – Oklahoma State University

ABSTRACT: More than half of the world's population now lives in urban areas, and the percentage is only projected to increase. Despite growth in the use and development of spatial pattern metrics to measure urban form, experts have yet to reach agreement on how to best measure the structure of urban environments. As a result, we remain several steps removed from connecting urban patterns to their causal processes. While research suggests that the height and shape of the urban environment may influence ecological processes (e.g., heat islands), researchers to date have mainly adopted traditional 2D spatial pattern metrics to describe and analyze urban landscapes. While 2D spatial pattern metrics catapulted spatial pattern analysis to the forefront of quantitative ecological assessment and have been instrumental in advancing theories of pattern-process relations, these metrics fail to capture a critical dimension of urban form. In this study, we introduce several new 3D spatial pattern metrics to assess the structure of the urban environment. Specifically, we use lidar data, which is increasingly available, to extend the existing set of 2D patch-, class-, and landscape-metrics into three dimensions. We compute these metrics for 12 cities in the United States, which collectively represent a range of urban development histories and ecological regions, as a first step toward describing and analyzing relationships between 3D patterns and urban ecological processes.