Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Strengthening Landscape Ecology's
Contribution to a Sustainable
Environment
Clive A. McAlpine, Leonie M. Seabrook, Tiffany H. Morrison
and Jonathan R. Rhodes
Abstract The need to avert unacceptable and irreversible environmental change
is one of the most urgent challenges facing society. Landscape ecology has the
capacity to help address these challenges by providing spatially-explicit solutions
to landscape sustainability problems. However, despite a large body of research,
the real impact of landscape ecology on sustainable landscape management and
planning is still limited. This essay identifies four key areas where landscape
ecology can strengthen its contribution to achieving a sustainable environment.
These are: recognising the growing complexity of landscape sustainability prob-
lems; adopting a formal problem-solving framework to landscape sustainability
problems; helping to bridge the implementation gap between science and practice;
and developing stronger links between landscape ecology and restoration ecology.
Keywords Communities
Complexity
Decision analysis
Economic constraints
Landscape sustainability problems
Risk
Uncertainty
Institutional design
2.1 Introduction
One of the most urgent challenges facing society is to avert unacceptable and
irreversible environmental change arising from unsustainable land use and climate
change (Rockström et al.
2009
; Wijkman and Rockstrom
2012
; Wiens
2012
).
Managers of human-modified landscapes face a large number of interrelated
environmental problems stemming from a long history of cumulative land use and
land cover changes, including land degradation, loss of habitat and biodiversity
decline (Lindenmayer et al.
2008
). Twenty-five percent of Earth's land resources
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