Ecological dissimilarity among land-use/land-cover types improves a heterogeneity index for predicting biodiversity in agricultural landscapes

Abstract

Land-use/land-cover heterogeneity is among the most important factors influencing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes and is the key to the conservation of multi-habitat dwellers that use both terrestrial and aquatic habitats. Heterogeneity indices based on land-use/land-cover maps typically do not integrate ecological dissimilarity between land-use/land-cover types. Here, we applied the concept of functional diversity to an existing land-use/land-cover diversity index (Satoyama index) to incorporate ecological dissimilarity and proposed a new index called the dissimilarity-based Satoyama index (DSI). Using Japan as a case study, we calculated the DSI for three land-use/land-cover maps with different spatial resolutions and derived similarity information from normalized difference vegetation index values. The DSI showed better performance in the prediction of Japanese damselfly species richness than that of the existing index, and a higher correlation between the index and species richness was obtained for higher resolution maps. Thus, our approach to improve the land-use/land-cover diversity index holds promise for future development and can be effective for conservation and monitoring efforts.