Impact of error : Implementation and evaluation of a spatial model for analysing landscape configuration

Sammanfattning: Quality and error assessment is an essential part of spatial analysis which with the increasingamount of applications resulting from today’s extensive access to spatial data, such as satelliteimagery and computer power is extra important to address. This study evaluates the impact ofinput errors associated with satellite sensor noise for a spatial method aimed at characterisingaspects of landscapes associated with the historical village structure, called the HybridCharacterisation Model (HCM), that was developed as a tool to monitor sub goals of theSwedish Environmental Goal “A varied agricultural landscape”. The method and errorsimulation method employed for generating random errors in the input data, is implemented andautomated as a Python script enabling easy iteration of the procedure. The HCM is evaluatedqualitatively (by visual analysis) and quantitatively comparing kappa index values between theoutputs affected by error. Comparing the result of the qualitative and quantitative evaluationshows that the kappa index is an applicable measurement of quality for the HCM. Thequalitative analysis compares impact of error for two different scales, the village scale and thelandscape scale, and shows that the HCM is performing well on the landscape scale for up to30% error and on the village scale for up to 10% and shows that the impact of error differsdepending on the shape of the analysed feature. The Python script produced in this study couldbe further developed and modified to evaluate the HCM for other aspects of input error, such asclassification errors, although for such studies to be motivated the potential errors associatedwith the model and its parameters must first be further evaluated.