It would be illusory and quite tedious
to propose an exhaustive list of indices of spatial arrangement
suggested in the literature. The most productive fields of research
in this respect are certainly those of the geography, ecology,
regional sciences and the numerical image processing. From the
methodological point of view, most significant is to seize
the aspects
of the spatial arrangement which one wishes to describe through indices,
the way of interpreting them,
as well as their context of use.
In order to present a synthetic and structured vision these
descriptors of spatial arrangement for zonal units, we will organize
this description according to the factors of "scale of description"
and of "dimension" indices. In this Unit only major indices of spatial
arrangement will be presented, those one can find in GIS or spatial
analysis or image processing software (Idrisi, Fragstats, Envi…).