Because the viability of a population may depend on whether individuals can disperse, it is important for conservation planning to understand how landscape structure affects movement behavior. Some species occur in a wide range of landscapes differing greatly in structure, and the question arises of whether these species are particularly versatile in their dispersal or whether they are composed...

Ecological processes act upon landscapes over a wide range of temporal and spatial extents. These processes interact to create complex and ever-changing landscape patterns. While remote sensing data (e.g. AVHRR, TM) has often been used to characterize such heterogeneity at the landscape scale, these sensors cannot resolve spatial pattern to the detail required for finer scale analyses, such as ...

A new design framework is introduced for forest structure optimization based on a genetic algorithm landscape encoding and landscape ecology metrics. Landscape ecology is an important interface between the forest management community, which is a traditional user of operations research methods, and the biological conservation community which is relatively new to OR methods and whose goals are in...

The fundamental processes that influence metapopulation dynamics (extinction and recolonization) will often depend on landscape structure. Disturbances that increase patch extinction rates will frequently be landscape dependent such that they are spatially aggregated and have an increased likelihood of occurring in some areas. Similarly, landscape structure can influence organism movement, prod...

Landscape structure and diversity influence insect species abundance. In agricultural systems, adjacent crop and non-crop habitats can influence pest species population dynamics and intensify economic damage. To investigate the influence of landscape factors on stink bug damage in agricultural systems, we assessed stink bug damage from 30 processing tomato fields in the mid-Atlantic United Stat...

Adaptive (downhill) walks are a computationally convenient way of analyzing the geometric structure of fitness landscapes. Their inherently stochastic nature has limited their mathematical analysis, however. Here we develop a framework that interprets adaptive walks as deterministic trajectories in combinatorial vector fields and in return associate these combinatorial vector fields with weight...

Landscape structure results from complex interactions between geomorphology, climate, disturbance and succession. SELES is a tool for building spatially explicit simulations to model the role of disturbance in creating and maintaining landscape structure. Models built with SELES are raster-based, semi-Markov, whole landscape models (sensu Baker 1989) which use probabilistic disturbance spread. ...