Boltzmann entropy (also called configurational entropy) has been recently adopted to analyze entropy of landscape gradients (Gao et al. (2017, 2018, 2019)). The goal of belg is to provide an efficient C++ implementation of this method in R. It also extend the original idea by allowing calculations on data with missing values (Nowosad and Gao (2020)).
You can install the released version of belg from CRAN with:
install.packages("belg")
And the development version from GitHub with:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("r-spatialecology/belg")
As an example, we use two rasters - land_gradient1
representing a
complex landscape and land_gradient2
representing a simple landscape:
library(raster)
library(belg)
land_gradient1 = raster(system.file("raster/land_gradient1.tif", package = "belg"))
land_gradient2 = raster(system.file("raster/land_gradient2.tif", package = "belg"))
plot(stack(land_gradient1, land_gradient2))
The main function in this package, get_boltzmann()
, calculates the
Boltzmann entropy of a landscape gradient:
get_boltzmann(land_gradient1)
#> [1] 188772.5
get_boltzmann(land_gradient2)
#> [1] 121875.2
This function accepts a SpatRaster
, stars
, RasterLayer
,
RasterStack
, RasterBrick
, matrix
, or array
object as an input.
It allows for calculation of the relative (the relative
argument equal
to TRUE
) and absolute Boltzmann entropy of a landscape gradient. As a
default, it uses a logarithm of base 10 (log10
), however log
and
log2
are also available options for the base
argument.
get_boltzmann(land_gradient1, base = "log")
#> [1] 434664.7
get_boltzmann(land_gradient1, relative = TRUE)
#> [1] 137645.4
get_boltzmann(land_gradient1, base = "log2", relative = TRUE)
#> [1] 457248.1
Two methods of calculating the Boltzmann entropy of a landscape gradient
are available: "hierarchy"
(default) for the hierarchy-based method
(Gao et al., 2017) or "aggregation"
for the aggregation-based method
(Gao et al., 2019). The aggregation-based method requires that the
number of rows and columns in the input data must be a multiple of 2.
get_boltzmann(land_gradient1, method = "aggregation")
#> [1] 188772.5
get_boltzmann(land_gradient1, relative = TRUE, method = "aggregation")
#> [1] 137645.4
More examples can be find at https://github.com/Nowosad/belg-examples.
- Gao, Peichao, Hong Zhang, and Zhilin Li. “A hierarchy-based solution to calculate the configurational entropy of landscape gradients.” Landscape Ecology 32(6) (2017): 1133-1146.
- Gao, Peichao, Hong Zhang, and Zhilin Li. “An efficient analytical method for computing the Boltzmann entropy of a landscape gradient.” Transactions in GIS (2018).
- Gao, Peichao and Zhilin Li. “Aggregation-based method for computing absolute Boltzmann entropy of landscape gradient with full thermodynamic consistency.” Landscape Ecology (2019).
- Nowosad, J.; Gao, P. belg: A Tool for Calculating Boltzmann Entropy of Landscape Gradients. Entropy 2020, 22, 937. https://doi.org/10.3390/e22090937