A new landscape leakiness index based on remotely sensed ground-cover data 

 -  Ecological Indicators, 6(2), p.327-356, 2006 .
<br/><br/> A new continuous, cover-based, directional leakiness index, CDLI, is described that has a number of advantages over a binary-based, directional leakiness index, DLI, previously described in this journal. These indices are monitoring tools aimed to indicate the potential for gently sloping, arid and semi-arid landscapes to retain, not leak, resources, such as soils. To compute DLI, pixels in remotely sensed images had to be classified as being either vegetation patches or open interpatches. This simple binary classification procedure is unrealistic for images with relatively large pixels (e.g., 30-m pixel Landsat), where a single pixel is likely to be a mix of denser vegetation patches and more open interspaces. This mix of patch and interpatch within a pixel can be represented as proportional ground-cover. Because CDLI is based on these ground-cover data, which can vary continuously between 0-100 
<br/><br/><label>Subjects--Topical Terms: </label><br/>ARID<br/>LANDSCAPE FUNCTION<br/>RANGELANDS<br/>RESOURCES<br/>SEMI-ARID<br/>SOIL LOSS