Maybe you have already been looking for a simple way to extract thermal metrics from a map or an image of land surface temperatures? Or you were looking for a simple way to quantify ecosystem diversity using the Shannon Diversity index or the Simpson Diversity Index?

Simple image metrics such as the total number of non-NaN pixels and image shape, geographic metrics such as the area covered by non-NaN pixels or the whole map and statistical standard metrics such as minimum, maximum and mean values, the standard deviation and variance – all this is really easy using the ThermalMetrics plugin for QGIS3 with your thermal pictures and maps. Distribution is a very interesting and important variable in landscapes and ecosystems too. Therefore, the ThermalMetrics plugin provides you with a histogram function, that calculates a histogram and distribution metrics such as skewness, kurtosis and the Fisher-Pearson-Coefficient of Skewness (FPCS). I further added a section to define patches and calculate statistics and indices based on these statistics. For now, it is possible to calculate the Shannon Diversity Index, the Shannon Equitability Index, the Simpson Diversity Index, the Gini-Simpson Diversity Index and the Simpson Reciprocal Index.

I want to further develop this plugin. If you have any ideas what is still missing, or what could be a nice feature, please just contact me via the contact form. I’m always happy to hear from your experiences.

I created a tutorial to guide you through the whole workflow from thermal image, to thermal metrics results.