Landscape monitoring usually relies on land-use statistics which reflect the share of land-sue/land cover types. In order to understand the functioning of landscapes, landscape pattern mustbe considered as well. Indicators which address the spatial configuration of landscapes are therefore needed. The suitability of landscape metrics, which are computed from the type, geometry and arrangement of patches, is examined. Two case studies in a surface mining region show that landscape metrics capture landscape structure but are highly dependent on the datamodel and on the methods of data analysis. For landscape metrics to become part of policy-relevant sets of environmental indicators, standardised procedures for their computation from remote sensing images must be developed. Keywords: environmental indicators, GIS, land cover, remote sensing.