I worked through the assignment so I could learn a bit about the program and had a question. How are the input data gathered for analyses such as these? I examined the data in wordpad and I am assuming that the different numbers correspond to different habitat-types throughout a landscape. Does anyone recommend any paper(s) that we should check-out? Thanks in advance!

Chris

Images, raster files, grids etc. typically have a format where each pixel/cell has a single value and only these values are stored in the file.

In ASCII format, all values for one row of the image/grid are written into one line of the file. In our case, the values are numerical codes for the land-use/land-cover class.

While Fragstats asks us to enter the number of rows and columns and some other information about the file in the parameter dialog box, other software such as ArcGIS expects that information to be included in the file as a header (first few lines of the file). The header for the madison files looks like this (xllcorner and yllcorner could be used to provide coordinates for the lower left corner of the image/grid):

ncols 800
nrows 575
xllcorner 0
yllcorner 0
cellsize 30
nodata_value 999