 Hello, welcome back on my YouTube channel. In today's video, we're going to explore the Lycos plugin. The Lycos plugin stands for Landscape Ecology Statistics and contains several analytical functions for land cover analysis. Normally, it's applied to landscape ecology, but in this video, we're going to use it to explore the urban landscape. I've loaded here an open access land use map of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. You can find the plugin in the Plugins Manager and click Install Plugin. Close the dialog. The plugin adds a menu item under the Raster menu called Landscape Ecology and there you find three other items. The plugin also adds processing tools to the Processing Toolbox, which we can open with the gear, and here there's a Lycos section where we can also find the Landscape Statistics. Let's have a look at the tools under Landscape Statistics. Let's start with the Count Raster Cells tool. There are other tools in QDS that can do similar stuff, but let's see how this one works. As Raster Layer, I choose the land use map and as a result, I save it to a geopackage. For this project, I create a new geopackage called Rotterdam and I change the output layer name to land use count. Then I run the tool, close the dialog and it has added an attribute table to our layers panel, which I can open and here I see FID, the feature ID, value, which is the class number and number, which is the number of cells. We can use the number of cells also to calculate the area and square meters, so I use the field calculator, create a new field, area, square meters, it's a decimal number and under fields and values, I double click on number to add it to the expression and I do it times 25 because the pixel size is 5 meters, so 5 times 5 is 25 square meters. Click OK and here we see the area and square meters added. Double off the editing and save the results. Now click a few times on the area field to sort the values and there you see which classes have the largest areas. So let's check which ones those are, that's 251, Main Infrastructure and Tracks and 18 Buildings in Primary Buildup Areas. This land use map has too many classes for my study, so therefore I'm going to simplify the land use map by aggregating classes. To do that I'm going to use the tool Reclassify by Table, in that way I can use a lookup table. In the dialog click the three dots to create a lookup table. I'm going to aggregate the land use classes to six classes, one water bodies, two urban, three infrastructure, four semi-natural, five agriculture, six other. So in minimum and maximum I type the original class ranges and under value I give the new output class number. Click OK and then expand Advanced Parameters which has very important parameters that you need to set and make sure that the minimum and maximum are part of the range and also change the output data type to byte. That means 8 bits means that we can store 255 values from 0 to 255, 256 values and our six classes easily fit in that amount. I save the result as a due tiff called land use tiff and there it has been reclassified. Now let's style these classes using the Layer Styling Panel, I change the renderer from single band grade to palleted unique values because this is a discrete roster, I click classify to add random colors to each pixel value that it found and I'm going to change the labels and the colors and make it more into it. Now let's go back to the Processing Toolbox and check another tool from Lycos. So I go here to Landscape Wides Statistics which will consider all the patches in the landscape and I use our aggregated land use map as an input and under what to calculate I see a different statistics and metrics and I choose here the median, I save the result to the geo package with the layer name median. After running I close the dialog and I check the result. Class number 3 is our median class, close the attribute table and go back to Landscape Wides Statistics. Here choose again land use as the landscape grid and here I'm going to try one of the diversity indices that are provided and also save it to the geo package. I give it the name Shannon and then I run it. Unfortunately these don't work and I don't know why that is the case so let's proceed with the patch statistics. Double click patch statistics and change landscape grid to land use and here we can choose one class that we want to consider so we consider all the patches of a specific land use class and I'm interested here in the semi-natural class to check all the urban green and I want to know more about the patch cohesion index which is an index for the connectivity of the patches and the higher the number the more connected the patches are. I save the result to my geo package and I call it patch cohesion index natural. Then I run it, this will take some time. After running we keep it open because we're going to repeat this so I'm just going to check here the attribute table with the result and it gives me a value of 9.6 and it's hard to judge such a number. You should either compare this class for different cities or compare this class to other classes. In this case I'm going to choose another landscape class. I'm going to use class number two which is urban so I change here the layer name to patch cohesion index urban and I run the tool again. Let's check the result and here we see that the patch cohesion index is reduced so from 9.65 to 9.3 and let's do another one. Let's have a look at infrastructure that should be very connected. Let's see if that's also then the result. Change the output layer name to patch cohesion index infrastructure and click run. This one runs also much faster. Let's have a look and this one has a patch cohesion index of 9.97 etc. So much more connectivity which can be expected from infrastructure. Now let's have a look at the menu options here so I'll go to raster landscape ecology landscape statistics I change the land cover grid to land use and there I have several tabs to calculate one metric or select multiple metrics and if I choose one metric like the one we had before patch cohesion index I can get a direct value output with the result for all the classes and that's what you see here. So in the first column you see the class numbers and we have six classes and then we see the patch cohesion index for the different classes so in this way you can get an overview of all the classes and you can also save this to a CSV file instead of to the screen. If you close the table it closes the whole dialogue so if you want to try something else I need to go back change the land cover grid back to land use and let's have a look at the other tabs so I can choose here multiple that will be calculated or I can go here to the landscape metrics tab which calculates metrics for all the classes together and in this case let's see if the Shannon diversity index works check the box and click okay and this calculates very fast and here we have the number so this gives an indication of how diverse the landscape is and the last thing I want to try here is to save it to a CSV so I go back to landscape statistics change the land cover grid to land use use again the patch cohesion index and save the result as a CSV file we call it patch cohesion and then I run it and after some time I get the result so here is the comma separated file and you can see that the column separator is not a comma but a semicolon I hope you've enjoyed this video in the description of this video I will add a link to the fragstads manual which contains a description of many of these metrics and you can use then other metrics to explore your urban landscape please sign up to my youtube channel if you've enjoyed this video and you can also become a member of the youtube channel if you get stuck with my videos and you want to have priority attention for your questions in the comments or want to use my slack channel then you're welcome to join as a member