Landscape ecology deals with ecological processes in their spatial context. It shares with ecosystem ecology the primate of emergent ecological disciplines. The aim of this contribution is to approach the definition of landscapes using cognitive paradigms. Neutral-based landscape (NbL), individual-based landscape (IbL) and observed-based landscape (ObL) are defined to explore the cognitive mech...

The problem of defining efficient techniques for knowledge representation (KR) is becoming more and more a challenging topic in both academic and industrial community. The Semantic Web needs of formal knowledge representations for implementing useful services and put in common the different views between man and machines. In this framework, we assume that new approaches for knowledge definition...

Multipurpose mosaic (“ecoagriculture”) landscapes can serve the purpose of land sharing to combine objectives of agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. Rewarding the people who shape and maintain those landscapes could act as a mechanism to generate added-value representing an indirect payment for ecosystem services. We investigated the feasibility of such an approach in two are...

The objective of this paper is to discuss concepts of landscape sustainability in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Phoenix is situated in the greater Salt River Valley of the lower Sonoran Desert in the southwest United States. In this paper I use the ecological frameworks of ecosystem services and resiliency as a metric for understanding landscape sustainability. An assessment of landscape susta...

As early as 1836 the first Surveyor-General to the new colony of South Australia, Colonel William Light, referred to the Mount Lofty Ranges as ‘these enchanted hills’ and since this time the symbiotic relationship between the Mount Lofty Ranges and the city of Adelaide has been highly valued by the people of Adelaide. One aim of the recently completed Adelaide Hills Face Zone Cultural Heritage ...

Introduction Male circumcision provides a high level of protection against sexually acquired HIV infection and is a key element of prevention in countries with extensive heterosexual transmission. In some countries, penile cutting practices other than full circumcision are a part of the cultural landscape, raising the question of their ability to modify the risk of HIV. One such country is Papu...

This essay examines cultural and structural patterns of information use in a virtual meeting. An information landscape model provided an abductive approach for guiding ethnographic data collection acquired through participant observation. A political frame of information use was applied to analyze field data. The themes that emerged from the ethnographic componential analysis were governance an...