Landscape Planning and Conservation Biology: Systems Thinking Revisited

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Both conservation biology and landscape planning are fields enriched by their solid grounding in professional practice and the real world. Practicing conservation biologists know that landscape planning processes affect biodiversity on the ground, and practicing landscape planners know that biodiversity issues can decisively influence acceptance of planned change. Such pragmatic recognition, however, is not enough to advance the fields. Enormous ecological and public benefits could accrue if the two fields were to actively inform and change each other. Their similar aspirations to affect landscape change are shared with very few disciplines, and that should be a powerful incentive for collaboration, but their roots and cultural imperatives are sufficiently different to distract them from each other. Whereas conservation biology starts with inquiry into the relationships between species and habitats, landscape planning starts with questions about human occupancy of places and regions. While conservation biology depends on the cultures of basic and applied sciences, landscape planning depends on the cultures of professions: design, planning, real estate, and law. Whereas conservation biology is accountable to habitat as an outcome, landscape planning is accountable to human quality of life as an outcome. That habitats and quality of life rest on the same substrate of ecological quality is rather obvious to those who begin planning for places by inquiring into their ecological foundations. Even in this time of burgeoning approaches to sustainable design, however, the systemic, multiscale character of ecological functions clashes with the more piecemeal character of professional, political, and market mechanisms for landscape change. Conservation biology and landscape planning could be engaged in a dynamic exchange beyond these differences, in which each refines the definition and effect of the