Expanding the bridging capability of landscape ecology

Abstract

Landscape ecology has made tremendous progress since the 1980s, which is in part reflected in the rapidly increasing number of publications in the English literature (Fig. 1). For the period of 1991–2007, ten countries from North America, Europe, Oceania, and East Asia were contributed more than 92% to the total number of publications, and about 31 % of all articles were published in ten journals (Table 1). These numbers indicate that landscape ecology has been widely recognized in research and applications, and become a wellestablished scientific field internationally (Wu 2007). Based on our survey, it is clear that the assessment, planning, and modeling of various landscapes are dominant in the literature. The concepts and tools of landscape ecology have been increasingly integrated in biodiversity conservation and ecological restoration. Researchers have become more cautious and critical in using landscape metrics, with new methods such as graph theory and vector based landscape pattern analysis being introduced in landscape studies. Socioeconomic factors are increasingly considered in contemporary landscape ecology that emphasizes the driving mechanisms and environmental impacts of landscape change. Interfacing with other scientific fields has created new growing points of landscape ecology, including landscape genetics, fluvial landscape ecology, multifunctional landscape research, and sustainable landscape design and planning. These new growing points are leading landscape ecology to a more advanced stage. Landscape genetics, for example, combines landscape ecology with population genetics to understand the interactions between landscape characteristics and microevolutionary processes including gene flow, genetic drift, and selection (Holderegger and Wagner 2006). Thus, landscape genetics can help bridge fine-scale genetic studies with broad-scale landscape research and management, which is important in biological conservation and disease control. Landscape ecology has become an increasingly interdisciplinary field which will contribute significantly to the new sustainability science (Wu 2006; Naveh 2007). There is, however, still a long way to go to become a genuinely transdisciplinary enterprise. Landscapes are entities with overwhelming complexity, and the definitions of landscape often have to consider various ecological goods and services, cultural, and aesthetic values. Landscape ecological research, therefore, often requires the involvement of many disciplines from both natural and social sciences. Furthermore, the effective communication and application of scientific findings are dependent largely on the active participation of stakeholders (Luz 2000), which demands a transdisciplinary approach. To facilitate the development of landscape ecology towards a truly transdisciplinary science, it is B. Fu (&) Y. Lu L. Chen State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 2871, Beijing 100085, China e-mail: bfu@rcees.ac.cn