The concept of landscape ecology

Type :

Presentation

Pages :

9 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

12/05/2008

Category :

Political science

Sub category :

Ecology & environment

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Summary :

Introduction.
Underlying theories.
Interpreting landscape pattern.
1. Issues of scale.
2. Data constraints.
A key challenge for landscape ecology: reducing fragmentation.
Population isolation and barriers to movement.
The role of corridors.
Survival within a patch.
Woodland planting to counteract fragmentation.
Landscape ecology and forestry.
1. Fragmentation.
2. Edge effects.
3. Connectivity.
4. Disturbance.
Conclusion.

Abstract

landscape ecology is an emerging discipline that aims to understand the environmental processes and patterns inﬂuencing habitats and species beyond the site level. It arose independently in the latter part of the twentieth century in central and Eastern Europe and in North America as geographers, planners, and ecologists began to push the boundaries of their subject interests in the search for integrated approaches to land management of sensitive areas. They combined intellectual forces in the International Association of landscape ecology (IALE), formed in 1982. landscape ecology is based on the initial premise that a landscape can be viewed as a series of patches within an overall background matrix; taken together, patches and matrix make up a heterogeneous landscape mosaic. The signiﬁcance for forestry is that it can take the focus up a level from the management of stands within a forest to forests within a landscape. Each forest or woodland can be viewed as a patch, within a matrix of other land use. The power of landscape ecology is that its principles can apply at vastly different scales, depending on the landscape or the research question. It has been used equally effectively by natural resource managers in conservation planning of large protected areas such as watersheds or national parks and by those undertaking local-scale restoration projects consisting of a few sites. In Europe the challenge is often to mitigate the effects of development, but landscape ecology can be used more proactively to design for conservation and related beneﬁts.