Landscape Ecology: A Top Down Approach

by Sanderson; James

• ISBN13: 9781566703680
• ISBN10: 1566703689
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-12-15
• Publisher: CRC Press

Summary

Landscape Ecology - a rapidly growing science - quantifies the ways ecosystems interact. It establishes links between activities in one region and repercussions in another. Landscape Ecology: A Top-Down Approach serves as a general introduction to this emerging area of study. In this book the authors take a "top down" approach. They believe that context is equally as important as content and that an isolated, dismembered landscape fragment loses biodiversity. In contrast, past and current ecosystem studies have not considered the consequences of outside influences. The authors argue that the most detailed mathematical models of biodiversity within a landscape do not suffice to predict the outcome of management practices if the contextual analysis reveals that human impacts outside the landscape contribute to a reserve's ultimate demise. The material presented in this book demonstrates that protecting disconnected vignettes of nature in isolated national parks and reserves, or saving so-called "hot spots" of biodiversity, does not work. The rapid convergence of themes in ecology supports the study of the ecology of landscapes. Advances in this field will come from studies in landscape effects and the mobile organisms whose top down effects create and maintain landscapes. Landscape Ecology: A Top Down Approach supplies the basics for this work.

Table of Contents

Part I The Presence of the Past
Brief History of Landscape Ecology	3	(16)
Jim Sanderson
Larry D. Harris
An Epistemology of Landscape Ecology	19	(16)
Jim Sanderson
Larry D. Harris
The Prresence of the Past	35	(10)
Jim Sanderson
Larry D. Harris
Landforms and Landscapes	45	(14)
Jim Sanderson
Larry D. Harris
Part II The Ecology of Landscapes
The Ecology in Landscape Ecology	59	(14)
Jim Sanderson
Larry D. Harris
Landscape and Edge Effects on Population Dynamics: Approaches and Examples	73	(18)
Lennart Hansson
Part III Landscape Theory and Practice
The Re-Membered landscape	91	(22)
larry D. Harris
James Sanderson
Quantifying Constraints upon Trophic and Migratory Transfers landscapes	113	(30)
Robert E. Ulanowicz
Land Use in America: The Forgotten Agenda	143	(14)
John Turner
Jason Rylander
The European Experience: From Site Protection to Ecological Networks	157	(26)
Rob H.G. Jongman
Daniel Smith
A Land Transformation Model for the Saginaw Bay Watershed	183	(16)
Bryan C. Pijanowski
Stuart H. Gage
David T. Long
William E. Cooper
Individual-Based Models on the Landscape: Applications to the Everglades	199	(14)
Donald L. DeAngelis
Louis J. Gross
Wilfried F. Wolff
D. Martin Fleming
M. Philip Nott
Jane Comiskey
References	213	(24)
Index	237