Landscape Ecology

and methodological developments by recognizing the importance of micro-, meso-, macro-, and cross-scale approaches. The term landscape ecology was coined in 1939 by the German geographer Carl Troll, who was inspired by the spatial patterning of landscapes revealed in aerial photographs and the ecosystem concept developed in 1935 by the British ecologist Arthur Tansley. Troll originally defi ned landscape ecology as the study of the relationship between biological communities and their environment in a landscape mosaic. Today, landscape ecology is widely recognized as the science of studying and improving the relationship between spatial pattern and ecological processes on a multitude of scales and organizational levels. Heterogeneity, scale, pattern–process relationships, disturbance, hierarchy, and sustainability are among the key concepts in contemporary landscape ecology. Landscape ecological studies typically involve the use of geospatial data from various sources (e.g., fi eld survey, aerial photography, and remote sensing) and spatial analysis of different kinds (e.g., pattern indices and spatial statistics). The intellectual thrust of this highly interdisciplinary fi eld is to understand the causes, mechanisms, and consequences of spatial heterogeneity in landscapes. Heterogeneity refers to the spatial variation of the composition and confi guration of landscape, which often manifests itself in the form of patchiness and gradient. In landscape ecology, scale usually refers to grain (the fi nest spatial or temporal resolution of a dataset) and/or extent (the total study area or duration). When heterogeneity becomes the focus of study, scale matters inevitably because the characterization and understanding of heterogeneity are scale dependent. Landscape LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY