Scale and Scaling Scale is an essential concept in both natural and social sciences, and has been defined in several different ways (Gibson et al. [4], van Gardingen [19], Peterson and Parker [16], Marceau [12], Withers and Meentemeyer [21], Jenerette and Wu [6]). In landscape ecology, scale refers primarily to grain (or resolution) and extent in space or/and time. Scale may be absolute (measur...

Background concepts of the landscape research performed at the Department of Geography of the University of Ghent are described, discussed and illustrated with some examples. The integrated approach is based upon holism, perception and evolution. Holism allows the link between landscape ecology and perception. It explains the interaction between structure and functioning and the importance of t...

Quadrats are standard sampling units of relatively small, uniformly defined areas that divide a habitat of interest into subregions of equal size. They are used in ecography for 2-dimensional sampling of plants, slowmoving animals, and (more recently) microorganisms to (i) estimate population sizes when it is not feasible to measure their abundance in entirety, (ii) define the patterns of their...

Article history: Received 22 November 2005 Received in revised form 8 March 2006 Accepted 12 March 2006 In all natural populations, individuals located close to one another tend to interact more than those further apart. The extent of population viscosity can have important implications for ecological and evolutionary processes. Here we develop a spatially explicit population model to examine h...

Oasis stability in the lower reaches of the Tarim River was assessed at the landscape scale (including changes in landscape pattern and land use in the oasis) and at the regional scale (including the cold-island effect and NDVI of the oasis) based on the methods of landscape ecology, GIS and Remote Sensing (RS). Thematic Mapping (TM) remote sensing images from 1990, 2000 and 2009 were employed ...

With economic growth and the improvement of the urbanization level, human activities have constantly interfered with landscape patterns, resulting in serious threats to regional ecological security. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the evolution and optimization of the landscape patterns. Based on three TM images from 1990, 2000, and 2010, and selected landscape pattern indexes, ...

A fundamental premise of landscape ecology is that finer-scaled local ecological integrity is directly influenced by larger-scaled land use patterns. Therefore, characterizing landscape patterns that are mapped from satellite imagery may provide valuable covariate information about average integrity “on the ground”. This conjecture was evaluated in Pennsylvania for 102 watersheds where land cov...

Department of Climatology and Landscape Ecology, University of Szeged, P.O.B. 653, 6701, Szeged, Hungary Department of Mechanical Engineering, Informatics Systems & Applications Group, Aristotle University, P.O. Box 483, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece Department of Meteorology, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány Péter st. 1/A, 1117 Budapest, Hungary Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of...

The term “landscape structure” refers to the configuration of vegetation and other land features over a large land area (usually an extent of many square kilometers). A landscape can be regarded as a mosaic composed of patches of different kinds— for example, different forest types, landforms, or human-built structures such as roads. The scientific discipline of landscape ecology is concerned w...