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Spatial metrics – useful indicators for society or mainly fun tools for landscape ecologists?

There is a pronounced demand for indicators to measure progress towards policy aims. Further, there is an increasing interest in documenting changes in the surrounding landscapes, and comparing trends of change in space and time, e.g. through landscape monitoring. Based on the theoretical framework of landscape ecology, this has initiated the development of spatial metrics. Typically, remote sensing information, GIS, and spatial metrics are used to provide a range of measures of landscape content and composition assumed to be of importance to various processes, e.g. changes in species distributions. The ability to quantify and compare different landscapes, link spatial patterns to ecological processes, and predict the outcome of different landscape change scenarios is highly desirable in itself. In addition, it is interesting to analyse whether the same measures could be used as indicators to facilitate communication between scientists and policy makers and/or management. However, a review of the current literature suggests that although progress has been made, a number of critical voices have also been raised, in particular questioning the use of spatial metrics in this context. In general, continued effort is therefore required to develop well-functioning landscape indicators.