Abstract
Landscape ecological modelling provides a vital means for understanding the interactions between geographical, climatic, and socio-economic drivers of land-use and the dynamics of ecological systems. This growing field is playing an increasing role in informing landscape spatial planning and management. Here, we review the key modelling approaches that are used in landscape modelling and in ecological modelling. We identify an emerging theme of increasingly detailed representation of process in both landscape and ecological modelling, with complementary suites of modelling approaches ranging from correlative, through aggregated process based approaches to models with much greater structural realism that often represent behaviours at the level of agents or individuals. We provide examples of the considerable progress that has been made at the intersection of landscape modelling and ecological modelling, while also highlighting that the majority of this work has to date exploited a relatively small number of the possible combinations of model types from each discipline. We use this review to identify key gaps in existing landscape ecological modelling effort and highlight emerging opportunities, in particular for future work to progress in novel directions by combining classes of landscape models and ecological models that have rarely been used together.
Highlights
Landscapes are the result of numerous processes that operate and interact across different spatial and temporal scales
Biogeochemical, and anthropogenic factors are major determinants of landscape structure, and one of the primary goals in landscape ecology is to illuminate the relationships between this structure and ecological processes occurring on the land surface [1,2,3]
To arrive at this point we first provide key background. Some of this is of work that has been at the intersect between landscape modelling and ecological modelling, but some is focussed on progress in one field that has not yet been applied in the other
Summary
Landscapes are the result of numerous processes that operate and interact across different spatial and temporal scales. Low-level disturbance patterns in conifer forests may be propagated by bark beetle populations; the interaction between pattern and process can lead to large scale population outbreaks and the acceleration of forest successional trajectories [4] This complex dynamism between process and pattern presents significant difficulties for many aspects of landscape science, and modelling can provide a useful tool for meeting. Many studies have identified that habitat corridors promote the key ecological processes of movement and dispersal of particular species between habitat patches, but few have shown an increase in the patterns in which we are most interested, such as population size and species diversity [6] For these reasons, modelling—and especially simulation modelling—has become an important research tool in landscape ecology [7]. We will first discuss models of landscape and land-use dynamics before moving on to spatial ecological models
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