Landscape Ecology: Past, Present and Future

In the preceding chapters we discussed the central role that spatial and temporal variability play in ecological systems, the importance of addressing these explicitly within ecological analyses and the resulting need to carefully consider spatial and temporal scale and scaling. Landscape ecology is the science of linking patterns and processes across scale in both space and time. Thus landscape ecology is, in a real sense, the foundational science for addressing the central issues of sensitive dependence of ecological process on spatial and temporal variability. This chapter reviews the historical origins and evolution of landscape ecology, discusses its current scope and limitations, and then anticipates the following chapter by looking forward to identify how the field could best expand to address the central challenges of ecological prediction in spatially complex, temporally disequilibrial, multi-scale ecological systems. Landscape ecology has emerged as an integrative, eclectic discipline, focusing explicitly on spatial structure and dynamics of landscape systems (Turner 1987). Traditionally, ecological science has largely been limited to the study of relationships between the structure and function of entities assumed for simplicity to be spatially homogeneous and temporally stable (Pickett and Cadenasso 1995). Landscape ecology, in contrast, views spatial heterogeneity as a prime causal factor in ecological interactions. Pickett and Cadenasso (1995) state that the primary insight to emerge from landscape ecology is the realization that spatial heterogeneity at various