Landscape Ecology Theory and Practice, Global Applications

As mentioned above, since the beginning of the 1980 s , Naveh has widened the horizon of his studies from Mediterranean to global issues of landscape ecology and sustainability. One of his first major studies, and also the first paper in the English language dealing at length with landscape ecology, was published in "Advances in Ecological Research, 1982" This piece was a response to a critical review of human ecology by Young in 1974, in which landscape ecology was not mentioned at all. Considering landscape ecology as an emerging branch of human ecosystem science, Naveh reviewed the development of the different schools of landscape ecology in Central and Eastern Europe. He redefined the conceptual and practical basis of holistic landscape ecology in the light of recent developments in systems theory, biocybernetics and the theory of self-organization in natural and human systems. Landscapes are to be viewed, studied, and managed not only within the ecological/functional and the geographical/spatial dimensions of the natural sciences. Landscapes have to be treated within a much broader context of the integrated humannature systems complex in which we live. This is the Total Human Ecosystem, integrating humans and their total environment at the highest co-evolutionary level of the global ecological hierarchy.