Hello everyone, I have a question concerning the Habitat Quality results. The simplest version of the model gives us a habitat quality map and a habitat degradation map. My doubt is the following…
Does it make sense to combine the two maps in a following map with a bivariate scale symbology? In other words the symbology shows on the x-axis the quality of each pixel and on the y-axis the degradation. This would show where we have high quality and high potential degradation (requires attention), and where we have other (less problematic) combinations of these two factors.
My doubt is that the degradation already takes into account quality and, on the other hand, quality already takes into account degradation. Thus, it does not make sense to combine these two maps, since the combination is actually already displayed in the habitat quality index.
Thanks for helping me out. I can provide further information if needed.
You’re correct that habitat quality is derived from habitat degradation, and is essentially the inverse of it (modified by the half-saturation constant). So showing both doesn’t really provide new information. While there’s probably nothing wrong with showing both, I’d choose one or the other, depending on what’s most useful or intuitive for your audience, and note to them that the other metric is the inverse.
Thanks for your feedback. Is it not possible to do what I want to do with the data that is generated in the in-between steps that are also saved as GEOTIFFs in the respective folder? I think my analysis and narrative would greatly benefit from this comparison between “theoretical” quality and potential degredation, displayed as two separate entities.
The intermediate files can be interesting, particularly if you want to visually show the area over which each threat may impact habitat, and of course you’re welcome to use those.
I don’t think that the model produces a “theoretical” quality map, since the quality map is directly generated from degradation. You could perhaps show a map of the different land cover types and their suitability as habitat as a theoretical maximum? It makes things a bit more complicated that the model outputs relative rankings only, so it’s not like you can really add or subtract outputs to get a meaningful result.
I’m not familiar enough with the underlying model math to give much more advice on this, so if anyone else has experience, please chime in!