In search of Schrödinger’s patch: a functional approach to habitat delineation

This paper describes a functional approach to habitat delineation and its integration into the computation of fragmentation-related metrics. This methodological framework achieves, for the first time, (1) a multivariate delineation of habitat based on <i>type-1</i> fuzzy membership and the operationalising of neighbourhood effects and (2) the harnessing of uncertainty in land cover classification (<i>type-2</i> fuzzy membership) to achieve a distribution of possible outcomes that resolves the <i>continuity-contiguity problem</i>. This new methodology provides a long-awaited functional definition of habitat patches for those seeking to understand the role of habitat fragmentation in biodiversity outcomes.