1. Landscape ecology deals with the influence of spatial pattern on ecological processes. It considers the ecological consequences of where things are located in space, where they are relative to other things, and how these relationships and their consequences are contingent on the characteristics of the surrounding landscape mosaic at multiple scales in time and space. Traditionally, landscape...

Over the past centuries, humans have transformed large parts of the biosphere, and there is a growing need to understand and predict the distribution of biodiversity hotspots influenced by the presence of humans. Our basic hypothesis is that human influence in the Anthropocene is ubiquitous, and we predict that biodiversity hot spot modeling can be improved by addressing three challenges raised...

It is widely believed that urban ecological landscape regards the city to be an ecosystem built by human activities and supported by natural and man-made functions and processes over time. In the past, human communities have selected their residing places and designed their cities by paying attention to natural environmental resources. The profound influence of technology and industry has broug...

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...

Large variations exist in the size, abundance and biota of the two principal categories of freshwater ecosystems, lotic (flowing water; e.g., rivers, streams, deltas and estuaries) and lentic (standing water; lakes, ponds and wetlands) found across the circumpolar Arctic. Arctic climate, many components of which exhibit strong variations along latitudinal gradients, directly affects a range of ...

1. ABSTRACT Landscape ecology has advanced with rapid developments in technology, increasing knowledge exchange among scientific disciplines, and a growing number of modern scientists across disciplines. The science of landscape ecology represents a unique discipline examining biophysical and social processes across multiple ecosystems and multiple dimensions of time and space. This discipline ...

Fire as a landscape process is of broad interest to ecologists and land managers. Fires alter forest age-distributions (Heinselman, 1973; Van Wagner, 1978), are sensitive to climate (Balling et al., 1992, Swetnam and Bettancourt, 1990; Swetnam, 1993; Timoney and Wein, 1991), can be manipulated by fire suppression (Baker, 1992; Barrett, 1994), and affect directions for land management policy (Hu...

In the past 30 years, the notion of landscape has emerged in ecology as a result of both theoretical strategies and practical aspects of land use. This has generated a variety of computerized models addressing both objectives and techniques. Scientists model landscapes for at least two reasons: to better understand the landscape dynamics themselves (called intrinsic needs) and to offer a realis...

The many ways that people have used and managed land throughout history has emerged as a primary cause of land-cover change around the world. Thus, land use and land management increasingly represent a fundamental source of change in the global environment. Despite their global importance, however, many decisions about the management and use of land are made with scant attention to ecological i...