Résumé :
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Landscape ecology has tome to the forefront of ecology and land management in recent decades, and it is still expanding vert' rapidly. Landscape ecology emphasizes the interaction between spatial pattern and ecological process, that is, the causes and consequences of spatial heterogeneity across a range of scales. Two important aspects of landscape ecology distinguish it from other subdisciplines within ecology. First, landscape ecology explicitly addresses the importance of spatial configuration for ecological processes. Second, landscape ecology often focuses on spatial extents that are much larger than those traditionally studied in ecology. These two aspects, explicit treatment of spatial heterogeneity and a focus on broad spatial scales, are complementary and encompass much of the breadth landscape ecology. The recent emergence of landscapes as an appropriate scale for ecological stuc resulted from (1) broad-scale environmental issues and land-management problem (2) the development of new scale-related concepts in ecology, and (3) technologie advances, including the widespread availability of spatial data, the software to m nipulate these data, and the rapid rise in computational power. However, landscal ecology has a history, with its mots in Central and Eastern Europe. The major 1 erature of landscape ecology from its inception in the late 1930s through the car 1980s was predominantly in German and Dutch; the terni landscape ecology w virtually absent from North American literature in the mid 1970s. The recent sear( for principles governing the interaction of pattern and process at the landscape sca began with two influential workshops in the early 1980s in Europe and North Am( ica. The questions addressed by landscape ecologists typically couple the observ tion that landscape mosaics have spatial structure with topics that have interesti ecologists for a long tune. Landscape ecology has grown out of intellectuel developments that extended back many decades and include phytosociology and bi geography, landscape design and management, geography, regional modeling, th oretical ecology, Island biogeography, and mathematical theory.
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