Stephanie A. Socher*, Daniel Prati, Steffen Boch, Jörg Müller, Valentin H. Klaus, Norbert Hölzel and Markus Fischer Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern, Altenbergrain 21, CH-3013, Bern, Switzerland; Institute of Biochemistry and Biology, University of Potsdam, Maulbeerallee 1, D-14469, Potsdam, Germany; and Institute of Landscape Ecology, University of Münster, Robert-Koch-Str. 28, ...

Urbanization, and the resulting land use/cover change, is a primary cause of the degradation of coastal wetland ecosystems. Reclamation projects are seen as a way to strike a balance between socioeconomic development and maintenance of coastal ecosystems. Our aim was to understand the ecological changes to Jiangsu’s coastal wetland resulting from land use change since 1977 by using remote sensi...

1 Institute of Arctic Biology, 311 Irving I Bldg., University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska, 99775, USA 2 US Geological Survey, 345 Middlefield Rd. MS 962, Menlo Park, California, 94025, USA 3 Institute for Botany and Landscape Ecology, Grimmer Strasse 88, Greifswald University, 17487, Greifswald, Germany 4 U.S. Geological Survey, Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Uni...

Landscape ecology is a field that has grown from realizing that maintenance of ecological resources requires management at several spatial and temporal scales, including landscape-level ecosystems as whole units of study and management (Forman, 1995; Grumbine, 1994; Noss, 1983 and 1996). The subsequent need for characterizing landscape structure has led to a variety of measurements for assessin...

Reedswamps meet three important functions in landscape ecology: They act as a structural element and as a food-plant for a highly specialized fauna (species protection), the rhizomes stabilize the sediment and the stalks dissipate the wave energy (shore protection), and they improve the conditions for an enhanced microbial decomposition of an external organic load and an elimination or fIXation...

Although a number of digital terrain analysis techniques were developed since the early 90ies terrain information is not utilized enough in landscape research even if topography is a key variable in a wide range of environmental processes. One explanation of this situation is the two-dimensionality of the main paradigm in landscape ecology, namely the patch-corridor-matrix model. Calculations o...

In the past 30 years, the notion of landscape has emerged in ecology as a result of both theoretical strategies and practical aspects of land use. This has generated a variety of computerized models addressing both objectives and techniques. Scientists model landscapes for at least two reasons: to better understand the landscape dynamics themselves (called intrinsic needs) and to offer a realis...

The rapid growth of the built environment has been pointed out as one of the major challenges to sustainability in the US. Low density “sprawling” neighborhoods represent the most undesired form of urban growth both for the waste of land and energy they cause, as well as for the lack of a “sense of place” they promote among their inhabitants. Several critiques to such type of urbanization have ...

Land use and land-use change play an important role in global integrated assessments. However, there are still many uncertainties in the role of current and historical land use in the global carbon cycle as well as in other dimensions of global environmental change. Although databases of historical land use are frequently used in integrated assessments and climate studies, they are subject to c...

Inquiries into the issue of scale become increasingly important in the field of landscape ecology and natural resource modelling and analysis. Scales of observation and modelling are often pre-set based on the a priori description of the system of study. In this paper we focus on upscaling approaches. We emphasize that predictability depends on the relation between the spatial and the temporal ...