I am interested in determining an relative cost of movement from a central location within a landscape buffer to the edge of that buffer (1500m). I have a raster file that classifies the landscape into forest, other, and water. Each of these land cover categories will have a resistance value associated with it (with forest being the most resistant, followed by water, and then other land).
With this in mind, I would like to assign these resistance values to each pixel of the aforementioned land cover type, and then query straight line paths through the landscape from the center of the landscape, to the edge of the 1500m buffer – adding up the total resistance cost (summed pixels, basically) for a hypothetical organism. Ideally, I would do this between 8-24 times radially to get an mean resistance value for a particular landscape. I have a total of 17 different landscapes to assess.
See the image below for a sample landscape. The center cross hairs represent a nest of bumblebees (study organism), and the black line indicates a flight path through the landscape.
Any suggestions as to a workflow/series of tools or useful code? I don’t want someone to write a full script that would this for me – I’d rather have some assistance/direction so that I can learn.