History Of Landscape Ecology In The United States

This book describes the emergence of landscape ecology, its current status as a new integrative science, and how distinguished scholars in the field of landscape ecology view the future regarding new challenges and career opportunities. Over the past thirty years, landscape ecology has utilized development in technology and methodology (e.g., satellites, GIS, and systems technologists) to monitor large temporal-spatial scale events and phenomena. These events include changes in vegetative cover and composition due to both natural disturbance and human cause—changes that have academic, economic, political, and social manifestations. There is little doubt, due to the temporal-spatial scale of this integrative science, that scholars in fields of study ranging from anthropology to urban ecology will desire to compare their fields with landscape ecology during this intellectually and technologically fertile time. History of Landscape Ecology in the United States brings to light the vital role that landscape ecologists will play in the future as the human population continues to increase and fragment the natural environment. Landscape ecology is known as a synthesized intersection of disciplines; but new theories, concepts, and principles have emerged that form the foundation of a new transdiscipline.

This book presents the state of the art of the fundamentals of landscape ecology. It integrates different ecological approaches, in which the spatial arrangement of living organisms and their aggregations are considered as an important component of environmental complexity. A reconciliation between the ecosystem approach and the landscape approach is discussed. Geobotanical, animal and human perspectives are considered and compared with regional (broad-scale) process-oriented landscape ecology. It presents methods and applications for land evaluation and management of the real world, with particular emphasis on the scalar property of ecological processes and their patterns. This book represents a development of the author's previous book (Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology) with greater emphasis on applications. The first part is devoted to the fundamentals of landscape ecology, critically revisited. The second part focuses on landscape evaluation (resilient properties, fragility characteristics, connectivity aspects, and healthy conditions). The last part concentrates on management approaches.

In North America, concepts of Historical Range of Variability are being employed in land-management planning for properties of private organizations and multiple government agencies. The National Park Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and The Nature Conservancy all include elements of historical ecology in their planning processes. Similar approaches are part of land management and conservation in Europe and Australia. Each of these user groups must struggle with the added complication of rapid climate change, rapid land-use change, and technical issues in order to employ historical ecology effectively. Historical Environmental Variation in Conservation and Natural Resource Management explores the utility of historical ecology in a management and conservation context and the development of concepts related to understanding future ranges of variability. It provides guidance and insights to all those entrusted with managing and conserving natural resources: land-use planners, ecologists, fire scientists, natural resource policy makers, conservation biologists, refuge and preserve managers, and field practitioners. The book will be particularly timely as science-based management is once again emphasized in United States federal land management and as an understanding of the potential effects of climate change becomes more widespread among resource managers. Additional resources for this book can be found at: www.wiley.com/go/wiens/historicalenvironmentalvariation.

Human activity during the Anthropocene has transformed landscapes worldwide on a scale that rivals or exceeds even the largest of natural forces. Landscape ecology has emerged as a science to investigate the interactions between natural and anthropogenic landscapes and ecological processes across a wide range of scales and systems: from the effects of habitat or resource distributions on the individual movements, gene flow, and population dynamics of plants and animals; to the human alteration of landscapes affecting the structure of biological communities and the functioning of entire ecosystems; to the sustainable management of natural resources and the ecosystem goods and services upon which society depends. This novel and comprehensive text presents the principles, theory, methods, and applications of landscape ecology in an engaging and accessible format that is supplemented by numerous examples and case studies from a variety of systems, including freshwater and marine "scapes".

The Handbook provides a supporting guide to key aspects and applications of landscape ecology to underpin its research and teaching. A wide range of contributions written by expert researchers in the field summarize the latest knowledge on landscape ecology theory and concepts, landscape processes, methods and tools, and emerging frontiers. Landscape ecology is an interdisciplinary and holistic discipline, and this is reflected in the chapters contained in this Handbook. Authors from varying disciplinary backgrounds tackle key concepts such as landscape structure and function, scale and connectivity; landscape processes such as disturbance, flows, and fragmentation; methods such as remote sensing and mapping, fieldwork, pattern analysis, modelling, and participation and engagement in landscape planning; and emerging frontiers such as ecosystem services, landscape approaches to biodiversity conservation, and climate change. Each chapter provides a blend of the latest scientific understanding of its focal topics along with considerations and examples of their application from around the world. An invaluable guide to the concepts, methods, and applications of landscape ecology, this book will be an important reference text for a wide range of students and academics in ecology, geography, biology, and interdisciplinary environmental studies.

An anthology of period documents that illustrate important facets of Americans' changing relationship with nature.

An ideal text for students taking a course in landscape ecology. The book has been written by very well-known practitioners and pioneers in the new field of ecological analysis. Landscape ecology has emerged during the past two decades as a new and exciting level of ecological study. Environmental problems such as global climate change, land use change, habitat fragmentation and loss of biodiversity have required ecologists to expand their traditional spatial and temporal scales and the widespread availability of remote imagery, geographic information systems, and desk top computing has permitted the development of spatially explicit analyses. In this new text book this new field of landscape ecology is given the first fully integrated treatment suitable for the student. Throughout, the theoretical developments, modeling approaches and results, and empirical data are merged together, so as not to introduce barriers to the synthesis of the various approaches that constitute an effective ecological synthesis. The book also emphasizes selected topic areas in which landscape ecology has made the most contributions to our understanding of ecological processes, as well as identifying areas where its contributions have been limited. Each chapter features questions for discussion as well as recommended reading.

Restoring Layered Landscapes brings together historians, geographers, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars to explore ecological restoration in landscapes with complex histories shaped by ongoing interactions between humans and nature. For many decades, ecological restoration - particularly in the United States - focused on returning degraded sites to conditions that prevailed prior to human influence. This model has been broadened in recent decades, and restoration now increasingly focuses on the recovery of ecological functions and processes rather than on returning a site to a specific historical state. Nevertheless, neither the theory nor the practice of restoration has fully come to terms with the challenges of restoring layered landscapes, where nature and culture shape one another in deep and ongoing relationships. Former military and industrial sites provide paradigmatic examples of layered landscapes. Many of these sites are not only characterized by natural ecosystems worth preserving and restoring, but also embody significant political, social, and cultural histories. This volume grapples with the challenges of restoring and interpreting such complex sites: What should we aim to restore in such places? How can restoration adequately take the legacies of human use into account? Should traces of the past be left on the landscape, and how can interpretive strategies be creatively employed to make visible the complex legacies of an open pit mine or chemical weapons manufacturing plant? Restoration aims to create new value, but not always without loss. Restoration often disrupts existing ecosystems, infrastructure, and artifacts. The chapters in this volume consider what restoration can tell us more generally about the relationship between continuity and change, and how the past can and should inform our thinking about the future. These insights, in turn, will help foster a more thoughtful approach to human-environment relations in an era of unprecedented anthropogenic global environmental change.