SLE202 - Landscapes and Their Management

Content

The use and management of land is central to many of the major environmental and societal issues of our age, including climate change, water degradation, urbanisation, biodiversity and habitat loss, human population growth, and the degradation and loss of agricultural land.  These are all issues that we increasingly need to understand and manage, locally and globally.

Landscape ecology provides a framework for developing solutions to these types of issues because it focuses on understanding spatial patterns in the landscape and how such patterns influence ecological processes. It does this at the scale of populations and metapopulations; the scale that determines whether species will become extinct or survive. Human  land-use is a major driver of changes to landscapes throughout the world, and understanding human society and working with people are essential to creating sustainable landscapes for the future.

Landscape evolution provides a critical underpinning for landscape ecology because it determines topography, landforms, soil types, and hydrology. These aspects of landscapes place fundamental limitations on where species can occur; they define moisture, nutrient and sunlight availability, as well as exposure to fire and wind disturbances. Overlaying those natural patterns of variation in resources and disturbances are the impacts of humans.  Understanding these landscape-scale factors is critical for predicting which species can persist at a site, the types of ecosystems that form there, and how they interact with other populations and communities across the landscape.

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