Introducing landscape ecology

Abstract

Our new journal has been developed by SPB Academic Publishing cooperating with the International Association of Landscape Ecology (IALE), which is affiliated with the International Association for Ecology (INTECOL). IALE membership includes landscape designers, architects, and planners, as well as soil scientists, geographers, modellers, biogeographers, and those biologists who call themselves ecologists. The journal is intended to be the official voice of IALE and to represent these various disciplines' interests and research on the landscape. Landscape sets the scale and orientation of the journal. Ecology indicates its breadth and wholistic approach. A central task of the editor and editorial board is to set the boundaries of the subject matter contained in the journal. These boundaries will be fuzzy, like those in nature, and will shift with time. In this introductory comment, I want to repeat some of the ideas presented at the second meeting of the USA chapter of IALE, at Charlottesville, Virginia, USA on March 11, 1987. The comments seem as relevant at the birth of a new journal as at the close of a meeting of a newly organized landscape ecology society. My comments were divided into three parts: first, general, philosophical matters; second, space and time; and third, human interactions with the landscape.