Gives a historical perspective in order to assess and critique current conservation management practices
Provides a complete understanding of the concept of Landscape Ecology
Explores Landforms and Landscapes ó an understanding of landforms and geomorphocological processes is essential in the understanding of the ecology of landscapes
Discusses the Fragmented Landscape ó focusing on the changes that need to be made for conservation management in the future
Includes a complete discussion of Habitat Conservation Planning
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.
Part I : The Presence of the Past
Chapter 1 : Brief History of Landscape Ecology
Chapter 2 : An Epistemology of Landscape Ecology
Chapter 3 : The Presence of the Past
Chapter 4 : Landforms and Landscapes
Part II : The Ecology of Landscapes
Chapter 5 : The Ecology in Landscape Ecology
Chapter 6 : Landscape and Edge Effects on Population Dynamics: Approaches and Examples
Part III : Landscape Theory and Practice
Chapter 7 : The Re-Membered Landscape
Chapter 8 : Quantifying Constraints Upon Trophic and Migratory Transfers Landscapes
Chapter 9 : Land Use in America: The Forgotten Agenda
Chapter 10 : The European Experience: From Site Protection to Ecological Networks
Chapter 11 : A Land Transformation Model for the Saginaw Bay Watershed
Chapter 12 : Individual-Based Models on the Landscape: Applications to the Everglades
References
Index
