Introduction. Landscape modeling of species and their habitats: History, uncertainty, and complexity

Abstract

From the start, the discipline of MODERN Landscape Ecology has focused on the interaction between spatial pattern and ecological processes. One area of focus has been to -better understand how the patterns of environmental features, habitats, and resources (e.g., gradients, patches) influence patterns of species distribution. Some of the earliest predictive modeling papers in the journal Landscape Ecology dealt with predicting vegetation patterns based on topography (e.g., Bolstad et al. 1998; Ostendorm and Reynolds 1998). One of the early tools developed for wildlife management was Habitat Evaluation Procedures (HEP) (Schamberger 1982; Urich and Graham 1983; Mladenoff et al. 1995). © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.