Linking Landscape Ecology with Hydrology: Evaluation of Landscape Metrics Influence on Streamflow

Selection of landscape metrics to evaluate their influence in hydrology usually comes from literature review due the lack of evidence on the effect on the hydrological regime in a specific territory. Most studies select about 15 landscape metrics which have been demonstrated to have hydrological impacts, but the relevance of the remaining landscape metrics is still unknown. Here we discretize landscape metrics just based on its correlation among each other, selecting 69 of them at class level and analyze its possible influence on the hydrological regime. Based on Landsat images, land use classification was performed in three nested basins in the Maipo River, Chile, to obtain a series of annual landscape metrics from categorical maps over a period of 25 years. Then, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression was used to explore the relationship between these landscape metrics and the hydrologic regime. Analyses show that no single set of landscape metrics explain the hydrological regime in all territories. Shape metrics were among the most important no matter the territory distribution, followed by Aggregation and finally Composition metrics. Although relative importance varies among basins and land use categories, landscape division and arrangement (SPLIT, IJI, CONTIGUITY) and patch shape complexity (PAFRAC, SHAPE) are among the landscape metrics with higher influence on hydrology. Integrating landscapes through its metrics, as the ultimate expression of socioeconomic pathways into hydrological modeling, can contribute to integrate social sciences into hydrology and water management sciences.