Landscape Ecology

Landscape ecology is a young branch of modern ecology that deals with the interrelationship between man and his open and built-up landscapes. As will be shown in this chapter, landscape ecology evolved in central Europe as a result of the holistic approach adopted by geographers, ecologists, landscape planners, designers, and managers in their attempt to bridge the gap between natural, agricultural, human, and urban systems.

Having traced the development of landscape ecology as a scientific discipline in Central Europe, we shall now attempt to outline its conceptual and epistemological framework. In our view, this is derived from the following closely connected scientific theories.

Recent decades have been witness to highly productive activities in the evolving fields of land-use capability analysis, regional landscape evaluation, ecologically based land-use planning and design, ecological management, and landscape reclamation. Major new capabilities and approaches have been developed that make possible intensive utilization of ecological insights and principles in addressing, in an integrative way, the relationship of human communities with their environment in the landscape of particular areas. The activities of leaders in several disciplines are discernible in this period of rapid evolution (Cocks and Austin, 1978; Steinitz et al., 1977; Vester, 1980; Whittaker, 1975; Walter, 1979; Whyte, 1976; Zonneveld, 1979; McHarg, 1969; Hills, 1976). Strides in developing methods and procedures that reflect a holistic viewpoint are evident in their work and writings. The interdisciplinary human ecosystem science of landscape ecology has increasingly contributed to research into, and planning and management of, our environment.

Half a century ago, Tansley loosed the word ecosystem on an unsuspecting and unprepared world of biologists. Tho he defined it as an integrated unit composed not only of plants and animals, but also the climate, soil and other aspects of the environment (but not man), the idea was ahead of its time. A decade later, I applied the concept to Vegetation (the integrated mosaic of plant-communities in time and space). Since then, the subject has met with many vicissitudes. On the one hand, theoreticians have seen only the theory, yet fail to grasp its essential nature by identifying the larger social holons with the only wholes they know: their own individuality, and their own species Homo sapiens. On the other hand, the ecolometricians of the present have made ecosystem analysis fashionable by applying their highly developed numeracy (the quantitative analogue of literacy) to studying the parts, not the wholes. One character has compared this behavior to that of an intelligent young boy taking the family grandfather clock all apart, and diligently describing each weight and wheel, and even the interrelationships between them. But the whole clock remains to him a vitalistic, mystical, occult, spiritualistic, subjective, qualitative thing, unworthy of elegant scientific interest. Biologist William Morton Wheeler, General Ian Christiaan Smuts, and the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin knew differently, even as philosopher Bertrand Russell, himself a mathematician, could frame the interests of scientists as philosophic “logicism”.