Landscape Criticality in the Anthropocene – Biodiversity, Renewables and Settlements

This project aims at developing a global in-depth understanding of landscape transitions from permeable to impermeable. To systematically identify state transitions where landscapes lose or regain their permeability, we propose to introduce the concept of Landscape Criticality, which generalises previous percolation-based approaches to capture the spatial configuration of landscapes. Landscape criticality describes the transition of landscape features (e.g., a land cover type, aggregated groups of land cover types, or anthropogenic objects) and their properties at a critical distance threshold at which multiple small, isolated clusters merge into an overarching cluster.