Applied Landscape Ecology

Francisco Castro Rego,Stephen C. Bunting,Eva Kristina Strand,Paulo Godinho-Ferreira

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119368229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

An insightful guide to the concepts and practices of modern landscape ecology

Elements of geography, conservation biology, soil science and other disciplines factor into landscape ecology's rich analyses of the ecological and environmental forces at play across different terrains. With its unique, organism-oriented approach to the subject, Applied Landscape Ecology considers the effects of ecological processes upon particular species and places its findings within the context of larger-scale concerns. Students, researchers, and practitioners alike will find this a rewarding and instructive read that offers practical and detailed information on the latest methods and technologies used in the field today.

This essential resource:

• Takes an interdisciplinary approach to landscape ecology
• Examines the subject within the contexts of specific organisms
• Covers cutting-edge technologies and methods
• Represents a collaboration between an international team of landscape ecology experts

Whether new to the practice or an established ecologist, anyone with an interest in this exciting and developing field should have a copy of Applied Landscape Ecology at their disposal.

1
Concepts and Approaches in Landscape Ecology

1.1 The Historical Development of Landscape Ecology as a Science

Ecology as a written science probably has its known beginnings in ancient Greece with Aristotle and particularly with his successor, Theophrastus, who was one of the first philosophers to study “the relationships between the organisms and their environment”. This definition of the term Ecology that was first used two millennia later by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, who, in 1866, associated the Greek words Oikos (house) and Logos (science) (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The Greek philosopher Theophrastus (371–287 BC) (left) and the German ecologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919 AC) (right).

Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Theophrastus._Line_engraving._Wellcome_V0005785.webp, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Ernst _Haeckel_2.webp (3 December 2017).

Haeckel further expanded the definition of Ecology in his writings in 1869¹: “By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature, the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact.”

Other subdisciplines of ecology focus on the study of the distribution and abundance of individuals of the same species (population ecology)², on the interaction between populations (community ecology)³, or, especially after the very influential book published in 1953 by Eugene Odum⁴, on the study of ecosystems (systems ecology). Ecology has expanded from populations to communities and ecosystems, and more recently to landscape scales.

The English word “landscape” first appeared in the late sixteenth century when the term landschap was introduced by Dutch painters who used it to refer to paintings whose primary subject matter was natural scenery, associating the word “land” (of Germanic origin) and the suffix “schaft” or “scape”, meaning shape⁵ (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Landscape painting of Richmond castle (1639) by the Dutch landscape painter Alexander Keirincx (1600–1652).

Source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection: Netherlandish Painters Active in Britain in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, http://ezine.codart.nl/17/issue/46/artikel/netherlandish‐painters‐active‐in‐britain‐in‐the‐16th‐and‐17th‐centuries/?id=191 (17 February 2017).

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “landscape” continued to be associated with paintings, but a new meaning of the term developed when Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1857) started the new science of plant geography. Humboldt explored the visual qualities of painted landscapes transforming the concept of landscape from its primary visual meaning into an abstract entity by finding its ecological unity⁶ (Figure 1.3). The concept of landscape was moving from art to ecological science.

Figure 1.3 Painting of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) (left) and photo of the German geographer Carl Troll (1899–1975) (right). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Humboldt#/media/File:Alexandre_humboldt.webp, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Troll (17 February 2017).

Source: Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806,

Following the work of Humboldt, it was another German geographer, Carl Troll, who first coined in 1939⁷ the term “landscape ecology” hoping that a new science could be developed that integrated the spatial approach of geographers and the functional approach of ecologists (Figure 1.3).

However, the science of landscape ecology would be one of the latest forms of ecology to develop. It was not until the 1980s that the concept was more widely developed and works on landscape ecology started to be produced in Europe and in North America with the books by Vink (1983)⁸, Naveh and Lieberman (1984)⁹, and Forman and Godron (1986)¹⁰. After the publication of this latter book, which is now considered to be a main foundation of this science, references to landscape ecology started to become common in scientific literature and further developed after the beginning of the publication of the scientific journal of ...