Are landscape ecologists addressing uncertainty in their remote sensing data

In this quantitative review, we investigate the degree to which landscape ecology studies that use spatial data address spatial uncertainty when conducting analyses. We identify three broad categories of spatial uncertainty that are important in determining the characterisation of landscape pattern and affect the outcome of analysis in landscape ecology: (i) classification scheme uncertainty, (ii) spatial scale and (iii) classification error. The second category, spatial scale, was further subdivided into five scale dependent factors (i) pixel size, (ii) minimum mappable unit, (iii) smoothing, (iv) thematic resolution and (v) extent. We reviewed all articles published in the journal Landscape ecology in 2007 and recorded how spatial data was used and whether spatial uncertainty was addressed or reported in ecological analyses. This review found that spatial uncertainty was rarely addressed and/or reported