SPAN

One of the earliest landscape analysis programs to be developed was SPAN (Spatial Analysis Program) (Turner, 1990).

This program was written in FORTRAN and allowed a wide range of landscape indices to be calculated, such as patch size and perimeter, patch type proportions, fractal dimension, edge contrast and patch type adjacency.

SPAN was used by Turner and Ruscher (1988) to look at how landscape pattern had changed over the last 50 years in Georgia, USA.