Landscape Ecology: Does the Science Only Need to Change at the Margin?

Abstract

In 1983,25 scientists from the United States and elsewhere gathered for a workshop designed to define the concept of landscape ecology as it applied to the United States, to draw conclusions about the future of landscape ecology as a developing discipline, and to describe the key scientific questions (Risser et a1. 1984). The central questions at that time included the following: 1. How are fluxes of organisms, material, and energy related to landscape heterogeneity? 2. What formative processes, both historical and present, are responsible for the existing pattern in a landscape? 3. How does landscape heterogeneity affect the spread of disturbance? 4. How can natural resource management be enhanced by a landscape ecology approach? The essence of these four questions was included in a rather long and complicated operational definition of landscape ecology. In addition, the workshop concluded that further advancement of landscape ecology depended on (1) generating fundamental concepts for understanding the relationships between spatial and temporal scales, (2) making comparisons of managed and natural systems at multiple space and time scales, (3) building connections between population-level and ecosystem-level processes, and (4) involving a broad spectrum of natural, physical, and social scientists. It was also concluded that methods should be developed for managing and analyzing large amounts of data about landscape characteristics and processes , both as tools for scientists and as ways to share data with resource managers. A more recent review of landscape ecology (Pickett and Cadenasso 1995) offered a simpler definition, namely, as the study of the reciprocal effects of spatial pattern on ecological processes. In this discussion, as well as an earlier one (Risser et a1. 1984), there was a major focus on the structure of the landscape, especially as this structure relates to patches of different types of ecosystems and the flows between and among these patches. Pickett and 3