LecoS - A python']python plugin for automated landscape ecology analysis

The quantification of landscape structures from remote-sensing products is an important part of many analyses in landscape ecology studies. This paper introduces a new free and open-source tool for conducting landscape ecology analysis. LecoS is able to compute a variety of basic and advanced landscape metrics in an automatized way. The calculation can furthermore be partitioned by iterating through an optional provided polygon layer. The new tool is integrated into the QGIS processing framework and can thus be used as a stand-alone tool or within bigger complex models. For illustration a potential case-study is presented, which tries to quantify pollinator responses on landscape derived metrics at various scales. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.