|
Joan Nassauer
University of Michigan
Landscape ecology is an interdisciplinary approach to
defining issues and investigating questions about causes
and effects of landscape pattern and composition. The
overriding concern among landscape ecologists is ecological
effects. We ask: how might natural and human factors
affect ecological function?
From its start in Europe in
the 1930’s, when
the German geographer Carl Troll coined the term, landscape
ecology explicitly has included both biogeochemical
factors and anthropogenic factors among causes and
effects of landscape pattern and composition. Consequently,
human values and behaviors are as much a part of landscape
ecology as are other vertebrates – probably the
more troubling part! Landscapes that are unmistakably
the product of culture, urban and agricultural areas,
are as much the subject of landscape ecology as landscapes
that might look like natural areas.
The broad concept
of causes and effects, the interest in guiding as well
as understanding change, and the
consistent focus on landscape pattern and process for
all of the disciplines involved in landscape ecology
is the foundation for landscape ecology. It assures
that landscape ecology engages experts from across
the universe of biogeochemical, social, cultural, design
and planning disciplines – anyone who is building
knowledge about landscape pattern and process relationships
with implications for ecological effects. More importantly,
it assures that investigations of specific aspects
of landscape pattern and process are not oblivious
to other factors that affect landscape change or function.
A greater challenge, which landscape ecology has begun
to meet, presents an even higher standard: to demonstrate
how experts in very different disciplines work together
to frame landscape issues with new insight and make
real intellectual leaps in affecting landscape change.
As I see it, that challenge is where our greatest accomplishments
and greatest potential lie.
About Joan Nassauer
I am a Professor of Landscape Architecture in the School of Natural Resources
and Environment at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Had I not been prodded
into participating in a symposium on landscape heterogeneity at the Institute
for Ecology at the University of Georgia in 1985, I probably would not be writing
this from Ann Arbor today. In 1985, “landscape heterogeneity” was
a rather arcane concept – at least among the landscape architects and agricultural
landscape people I knew. In the end I participated in the symposium and was astonished
to find that within that group of roughly 200 from several disciplines we shared
a great enthusiasm for understanding relationships among the wide array of factors
that affect landscape change. We formed the US Section of IALE there, Richard
Forman and Michel Godron's first "big" landscape ecology text,
Landscape Ecology, stood on a lobby table in galley form poised
to take its place as a key reference, Frank Golley began many dedicated years
of nurturing the
journal Landscape Ecology to thriving maturity. The pieces were
in place for
what certainly must be claimed as a paradigm shift – at least for American
ecologists, foresters, geographers, and landscape architects.
I immediately
integrated this shift into my own teaching and research at the University
of Minnesota. In my view, it was so obviously what was needed to
bring a deeper rationale to the process of landscape change that is landscape
architecture. It inspired me to think about human perception of landscape,
which I had investigated for some time, from a perspective that was entirely
new and has driven my research ever since. A little less than a decade ago,
it led me to move to the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources
and Environment, where working in the interdisciplinary way that challenges
and deepens my own work is the mission of the school. And so, today I am writing
from Ann Arbor…
|
