Automatic Landscape Mapping Procedure

Abstract

Land-use cartography is essential to numerous studies that study the relations between processes or ecological functions and the landscape structure. This cartography is often made manually, sometimes arduously and in a non-reproductible manner. The process of automatic cartography of the land uses we present here was developed as an R package and can be used by anyone, even with no strong expertise of the R programming language. It provides the land uses within specified geographic zones (« buffers ») from vectorial geographic layers imported as it states in the geographic parcel register (RPG) or the geographic reference book for high scale topographic (BDTOPO). This process is reproductible, efficient and modulable. This article presents an application taking advantage of the alm (Automated Landscape Mapping) package, and provides guidance on how to use the main functions of the alm package.