Indicators of hemeroby for the monitoring of landscapes in Germany

The article discusses the concepts of “closeness to nature” and “hemeroby”, and outlines a method to establish two indicators of hemeroby. Until now Germany's national land use monitoring systems have lacked an indicator to capture the naturalness respectively hemeroby of the landscape. Based on digital spatial data on land use (DLM-DE) and the mapping of potential natural vegetation, these indicators have now been estimated for the whole of Germany and illustrated cartographically. The indicators have been integrated into a land use monitoring system (IOER-Monitor). A hemeroby index that considers all hemeroby classes of a reference area (e.g. administrative unit and regular grid cell) is presented as well as an indicator named “Proportion of certain natural areas”. The results on hemeroby of several time-cuts can be used to estimate the cumulative impact of land use changes on the environmental status.