Integrated modelling and assessment can facilitate exploration of complex socialeecological interactions and quantify trade-offs in regional policy, planning, and management options. However, there have been challenges in its acceptance and adoption for supporting decisions. Here we overcome this implementation gap through the development of an interactive online tool called the Landscape Futur...

The gradient based landscape metrics analysis is now widely used to study the landscape pattern change in respond to urbanization. In order to discover the Beijing metropolitan area landscape pattern spatial and temporal change trends during the past 15 years, several landscape metrics are computed along a 96 km long transect crossing Beijing metropolitan area from west to east. Specially, the ...

Fitness landscape analysis provides insight into the structural features of optimization problems. Landscape analysis techniques have been individually shown to capture specific continuous landscape features. However, results are typically for benchmark and artificial problems, and so the ability of techniques to capture real-world problem structures remains largely unknown. In this paper we ex...

We study self-replicating molecules under externally varying conditions. Changing conditions such as temperature variations and/or alterations in the environment’s resource composition lead to both non-constant replication and decay rates of the molecules. In general, therefore, molecular evolution takes place in a dynamic rather than a static fitness landscape. We incorporate dynamic replicati...

There are many applications that require rendered 3D terrain, whether it be computer games or complex geographical research. The methods used to represent terrain, generate realistic terrain and render terrain are studied in an attempt to better understand how people have previously tackled the key issues. The idea of fractal nature is studied and the effects, positive and negative, this has on...

Landscape ecology starts from the assumption that diversity and spatial arrangement of ecosystem mosaics have ecological implications and tries to understand the interactions between diversity and structure of large spatially heterogeneous areas and their ecological functions. These assumptions imply effective use of earth observation techniques and geographic information systems, enabling a gl...

Scale and Scaling Scale is an essential concept in both natural and social sciences, and has been defined in several different ways (Gibson et al. [4], van Gardingen [19], Peterson and Parker [16], Marceau [12], Withers and Meentemeyer [21], Jenerette and Wu [6]). In landscape ecology, scale refers primarily to grain (or resolution) and extent in space or/and time. Scale may be absolute (measur...

Background concepts of the landscape research performed at the Department of Geography of the University of Ghent are described, discussed and illustrated with some examples. The integrated approach is based upon holism, perception and evolution. Holism allows the link between landscape ecology and perception. It explains the interaction between structure and functioning and the importance of t...

Quadrats are standard sampling units of relatively small, uniformly defined areas that divide a habitat of interest into subregions of equal size. They are used in ecography for 2-dimensional sampling of plants, slowmoving animals, and (more recently) microorganisms to (i) estimate population sizes when it is not feasible to measure their abundance in entirety, (ii) define the patterns of their...