Landscape Ecology - Ecological Systems - page 188

Table 11.2 (continued)
Fast changing and chaotic
landscapes

• Rapidly urbanizing landscapes
• War zones
• Other highly dynamic landscapes

Landscape sustainability • Developing operational definitions and measures that integrate

ecological, social, cultural, economic, and aesthetic components
• Practical strategies for creating and maintaining landscape
sustainability

Human activities
in landscapes

• The role of humans in shaping landscape pattern and processes
• Effects of socioeconomic and cultural processes on landscape
structure and functioning

Holistic landscape
ecology

• Landscape ecology as an anticipative and prescriptive
environmental science
• Development of holistic and systems approaches

2. Causes, processes, and consequences of land use and land cover change: Land
use and land cover change is arguably the most important driver for changes in
the structure and function of landscapes. Land use and land cover change is
driven primarily by socioeconomic forces, and is one of the most important and
challenging research areas in landscape ecology. Numerous studies have been
carried out to investigate the effects of land use and land cover change on
biodiversity and ecological flows in human-dominated landscapes. More
research efforts are needed to incorporate the insights of economic geography
which studies how economic activity is distributed in space and resource
economics which determines how land will be used [ 41 ]. Long-term landscape
changes induced by economic activities and climate change, as well as “land use
legacies” (i.e., the types, extents, and durations of persistent effects of prior land
use on ecological patterns and processes) need to be emphasized in future
research.
3. Nonlinear dynamics and landscape complexity: Landscapes are spatially
extended complex systems which exhibit emergent properties, phase transitions,
and threshold behavior. To understand the complexity of landscapes, concepts
and methods from the science of complexity and nonlinear dynamics should be
helpful. For example, self-organization, percolation theory, complex adaptive
systems (CAS), fractal geometry, cellular automata, and genetic algorithms have
been used in the study of spatiotemporal dynamics of landscapes (e.g., [ 42 - 46 ]).
However, the theoretical potential and practical implications of these concepts
and methods are yet to be fully explored.
4. Scaling: Scaling refers to the translation of information from one scale to
another across space, time, or organizational levels. Spatial scaling, in particu-
lar, is essential in both the theory and practice of landscape ecology because
spatial heterogeneity does not make any sense without the consideration of
scale [ 47 ]. While scale effects are widely recognized in landscape ecology,
scaling-up or scaling-down across heterogeneous landscapes remains a grand
challenge in landscape ecology and beyond [ 48 ]. General rules and pragmatic