As urbanization increases around the world and fewer and fewer people have easy access to completely natural places, there is a growing need to understand how the landscapes we design and inhabit impact our health and wellbeing.[...].

Water, the bloodstream of the biosphere, determines the sustainability of living systems. The essential role of water is expanded in a conceptual model of energy dissipation, based on the water balance of whole landscapes. In this model, the underlying role of water phase changes--and their energy-dissipative properties--in the function and the self-organized development of natural systems is e...

Despite edges being common features of many natural habitats, there is little general understanding of the ways assemblages respond to them. Every edge between two contrasting habitats has characteristics governed by the composition of adjoining habitats and/or by the nature of any transitions between them. To develop better explanatory theory, we examined the extent to which edges act independ...

With rapidly increasing human populations as a driving force, agricultural expansion has intensified globally (Godfray et al., 2010; Tilman et al., 2011). As agriculture expands into previously unused regions, it fragments and replaces natural habitats, shifting diverse native vegetation to exotic monocultures that support lower biodiversity (Benton et al. 2002; Díaz et al. 2000; Donald, 2004; ...

Fitness landscapes are an important concept in molecular evolution since evolutionary adaptation as well as in vitro selection of biomolecules can be viewed as a hill-climbing-like process. Global features of landscapes can be described by statistical measures such as correlation functions or the fraction of neutral (equally fit) neighbors. Simple spin-glass-like landscape models borrowed from ...

Dorresteijn et al. [1] recently addressed the question what influence humans have on predator–prey interactions in human-modified landscapes. Their study follows increasing evidence from relatively natural landscapes that large carnivores are central drivers of ecosystem structure and functioning through density-mediated and behaviourally mediated effects on their prey [2]. A key question is wh...

M any natural landscapes have undergone dramatic permanent alterations as a result of human activities, including conversion to cultural landscapes; such changes are readily observed and understood. However, extensive ecological change can also occur in regional landscapes that are maintained in a seminatural state, changes that go largely unrecognized because the regional landscape retains an ...

BACKGROUND Conserving biodiversity in tropical landscapes is a major challenge to scientists and conservationists. Current rates of deforestation, fragmentation, and land use intensification are producing variegated landscapes with undetermined values for the conservation of biological communities and ecosystem functioning. Here, we investigate the importance of tropical variegated landscapes t...