A review of landscape ecology experiments to understand ecological processes

Abstract

Background: One way in which we make inferences about ecological processes is via experimentation. Many ecological processes happen at landscape extents and it is at this extent that experimentation is more challenging. This review explores the intersection between experimentation, ecological processes and landscape ecology. Specifically, this review seeks to discover how scientists design experiments to understand ecological processes at landscape scales. Results: I found 87 papers where these three concepts intersected, and reviewed them in more depth to assess characteristics of scale (treatment and study area extent), replication, research question and experiment type. Conclusions: The findings suggest that experimental approaches for understanding ecological processes are well established, and beginning to more readily accommodate spatial dimensions. However, there is room to integrate more spatially explicit, landscape-scale experiments into studies of ecological processes.