Applying Ecosystem And Landscape Models In Natural Resource Management

Managing today’s lands is becoming an increasingly difficult task. Complex ecological interactions across multiple spatiotemporal scales create diverse landscape responses to management actions that are often novel, counter-intuitive and unexpected. To make matters worse, exotic invasions, human land use, and global climate change complicate this complexity and make past observational ecological studies limited in application to the future. Natural resource professionals can no longer rely on empirical data to analyze alternative actions in a world that is rapidly changing with few historical analogs. New tools are needed to synthesize the high complexity in ecosystem dynamics into useful applications for land management. Some of the best new tools available for this task are ecological and landscape simulation models. However, many land management professionals and scientists have little expertise in simulation modeling, and the costs of training these people will probably be exorbitantly high because most ecosystem and landscape models are exceptionally complicated and difficult to understand and use for local applications. This book was written to provide natural resource professionals with the rudimentary knowledge needed to properly use ecological models and then to interpret their results. It is based on the lessons learned from a career spent modeling ecological systems. It is intended as a reference for novice modelers to learn how to correctly employ ecosystem landscape models in natural resource management applications and to understand subsequent modeling results.

This book provides a current synthesis of principles and applications in landscape ecology and conservation biology. Bringing together insights from leaders in landscape ecology and conservation biology, it explains how principles of landscape ecology can help us understand, manage and maintain biodiversity. Gutzwiller also identifies gaps in current knowledge and provides research approaches to fill those voids.

Today's natural resource managers must be able to navigate among the complicated interactions and conflicting interests of diverse stakeholders and decisionmakers. Technical and scientific knowledge, though necessary, are not sufficient. Science is merely one component in a multifaceted world of decision making. And while the demands of resource management have changed greatly, natural resource education and textbooks have not. Until now. Ecosystem Management represents a different kind of textbook for a different kind of course. It offers a new and exciting approach that engages students in active problem solving by using detailed landscape scenarios that reflect the complex issues and conflicting interests that face today's resource managers and scientists. Focusing on the application of the sciences of ecology and conservation biology to real-world concerns, it emphasizes the intricate ecological, socioeconomic, and institutional matrix in which natural resource management functions, and illustrates how to be more effective in that challenging arena. Each chapter is rich with exercises to help facilitate problem-based learning. The main text is supplemented by boxes and figures that provide examples, perspectives, definitions, summaries, and learning tools, along with a variety of essays written by practitioners with on-the-ground experience in applying the principles of ecosystem management. Accompanying the textbook is an instructor's manual that provides a detailed overview of the book and specific guidance on designing a course around it. Ecosystem Management grew out of a training course developed and presented by the authors for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at its National Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. In 20 offerings to more than 600 natural resource professionals, the authors learned a great deal about what is needed to function successfully as a professional resource manager. The book offers important insights and a unique perspective dervied from that invaluable experience.

The responsible management of natural resources for present-day needs and future generations requires integrated approaches that are place-based, embrace systems thinking, and incorporate the social, economic, and environmental considerations of sustainability. Landscape-scale analysis takes this holistic view by focusing on the spatial scales most appropriate for the resource types and values being managed. Landscape-scale analysis involves assessing landscape features in relation to a group of influencing factors such as land use change, hydrologic changes or other disturbances, topography, and historical vegetation conditions. As such, different types of data and multiple disciplines may be required for landscape analysis, depending on the question of interest and scale of analysis. Multi-resource analysis (MRA) is an approach to landscape-scale analysis that integrates information among multiple natural resources, including ecosystem services, and is designed to evaluate impacts and tradeoffs between development and conservation at landscape scales to inform public resource managers. This approach implicitly addresses social, economic, and ecological functional relationships; for example, actions to realize the benefits of one type of natural resource (e.g., minerals, oil, and gas) may influence behavior and potential benefits related to other types of natural resources (e.g., recreational opportunities). In June 2015, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop on using landscape-based approaches and MRA to better inform federal decision making for the sustainable management of natural resources. Participants discussed knowledge gaps and priority areas for research and presentations of case studies of approaches that have been used to effectively integrate landscape-based approaches and MRA into practice. This report summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

Michael Batty Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London Landscapes, like cities, cut across disciplines and professions. This makes it especially difficult to provide an overall sense of how landscapes should be studied and researched. Ecology, aesthetics, economy and sociology combine with physiognomy and deep physical structure to confuse our - derstanding and the way we should react to the problems and potentials of landscapes. Nowhere are these dilemmas and paradoxes so clearly highlighted as in Australia — where landscapes dominate and their relationship to cities is so fragile, yet so important to the sustainability of an entire nation, if not planet. This book presents a unique collection and synthesis of many of these perspectives — perhaps it could only be produced in a land urb- ised in the tiniest of pockets, and yet so daunting with respect to the way non-populated landscapes dwarf its cities. Many travel to Australia to its cities and never see the landscapes — but it is these that give the country its power and imagery. It is the landscapes that so impress on us the need to consider how our intervention, through activities ranging from resource exploitation and settled agriculture to climate change, poses one of the greatest crises facing the modern world. In this sense, Australia and its landscape provide a mirror through which we can glimpse the extent to which our intervention in the world threatens its very existence.

Publisher Description

This book will serve as a readable introduction to ecological modeling for people involved in resource management and will also review models for specific applications of interest to more experienced modelers. Successful uses of ecological models as well as discussions of important issues in modeling are addressed. The authors of this volume hope to close the gap between the state of the art in ecological modeling and the state of the practice in the use of models in management decision making.

This work covers topics in natural resource modelling to explain how they can be, have been, and should be used in making decisions about the management of natural resources. It aims to give managers and students the tools they need to assess and apply models effectively.