Principles and Applications in Landscape Ecology

Catalog description

Landscape ecology is a rapidly evolving discipline that is poised to address contemporary challenges in sustainability science, land management, and conservation. The focus of landscape ecology is on the controls, interactions and outcomes of spatial patterns and processes on ecological dynamics at multiple spatial scales. Landscape ecology explores how energy and nutrients flow across spatially variable patches, how dispersal and migration of aquatic and terrestrial organisms are affected by spatial networks, and how disturbances propagate across complex terrain. Grounded in related fields of ecology, geography, and spatial analysis, landscape ecology provides additional theoretical tools and approaches to guide applied conservation decision-making in a dynamically changing world.The objective of this course is for students to apply the methods, theories, approaches and practical applications of landscape ecology to inform landscape decision-making. Particular emphasis is placed on how humans modify landscapes and how species, ecological communities, and ecosystems have responded to these changes. These objectives will be met through lecture and discussion of prominent landscape ecology topics (scale, pattern quantification, agents of pattern formation, green infrastructure, and conservation biology), computer laboratory exercises, written papers, and group presentations.By the end of the course students will be able to (1) articulate in written and oral form the concepts of scale and pattern, (2) use landscape pattern metrics, spatial statistics, and models to characterize ecological pattern on landscapes, and explain how ecological patterns develop, and (3) apply knowledge of spatial pattern-process interactions to issues of sustainability, conservation, and landscape management.