Analytical Tools Interface for Landscape Assessments (ATtILA) for landscape metrics
The Analytical Tools Interface for Landscape Assessments (ATtILA) is an easy-to-use ArcView extension that calculates many commonly used landscape metrics. By providing an intuitive interface, the extension provides the ability to generate landscape metrics to a wide audience, regardless of their GIS knowledge level. ATtILA is a robust, flexible program that accepts data from a broad range of sources and is equally suitable across all landscapes, from deserts to rain forests to urban areas.
Four families of metrics are included in the extension, and each group has a dialog to accept user input on which metrics to calculate and what input data to use:
- Landscape characteristics: related to land cover proportions and patch metrics (e.g. percent forest cover or number and size of forest patches)
- Riparian characteristics: describe land cover adjacent to and near streams (e.g. percent of crop land within 30 meters of streams)
- Human stressors: concern population, roads, and land use practices (e.g. population change or road/stream crossings)
- Physical characteristics: provide statistical summaries of such attributes as elevation and slope
Once metrics have been calculated, the extension has three types of output display available:
- Displays areas ranked by individual metric values
- Ranks areas by a weighted index made up of two or more metrics
- Displays a bar chart of selected areas and metrics
To use the ATtILA, you will need version 3.1 or later of ArcView and the Spatial Analyst version 1.1 extension. Both UNIX and Windows (95, 98 and NT) environments are supported.