Effective Exercises in Teaching Landscape Ecology

The development of landscape ecology and its many applications to land management created a need for courses that address both the conceptual and practical sides of the discipline. Graduate seminars and full-fledged courses in landscape ecology are now featured at many colleges and universities; undergraduate ecology courses may include an introduction to principles of landscape ecology. Because landscape ecology involves the study of spatially explicit ecological patterns and processes along with much larger regions than ecologists have typically studied, landscape ecologists often employ a variety of new quantitative analysis techniques in their work. In parlicular, metrics are used to quantify spatial patterns, and the importance of spatial heterogeneity for ecological processes is evaluated. Modeling also plays an important role in landscape ecology because it is logistically impossible to conduct truly replicated experiments across entire landscapes. Students of landscape ecology. even at Ihe undergraduate level, need some familiarity with the tools of the discipline lo gain confidence in the practice of landscape ecology and to develop a critical understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques. This chapter contains six exercises created to teach concepts in landscape ecology. All three authors currently teach ecology at the undergraduate and/or graduate levels and incorporate landscape ecology principles in their specialized rind general courses. The text of each exercise is written for general USC in a class; notes specilically to Ihe inslruclor and recommended readings are included in the appendices. This collection of exercises stresses three main aspects of landscape ecology. Exercises I and II emphasize the quantification of landscape pattern. The iirst exercise is designed to familiarize students with straighlforward techniques for quanlifying Ihe similarities and differences between Iandscapes. The second demons&ales the important influence of spatial scale (both grain and extent) and classificarion scheme on landscape metrics. Exercises 111 and IV address the interpretation of landscape patterns. The third exercise allows students lo quantify changes through time in a Iandscape, challenging them to consider where and why these changes occur.