Landscape ecology has emerged in the past decade as an important and useful tool for land-use planners and landscape architects. While professionals and scholars have begun to incorporate aspects of this new field into their work, there remains a need for a summary of key principles and how they might be applied in design and planning. This volume fills that need. It is a concise handbook that lists and illustrates key principles in the field, presenting specific examples of how the principles can be applied in a range of scales and diverse types of landscapes around the world. Chapters cover:
I love landscape ecology, and have read books about it, in addition to aceing a graduate course in it, so I was able to wade through the hand-drawn diagrams and sparse, inelegant text of this book. I also have better than 20/20 vision, so the 6-10pt font sizes (8-10pt for the regular text, 6pt for the references and marginal notes and other 'small print') were not enough of a challenge to prevent my reading this book. I am really not sure who would find this book useflu, besides students in a graduate or advanced undergrad landscape ecology course. For them, this might be a useful supplement to class notes, but many of the diagrams and text descriptions won't be very helpful without a lot of additional material or background. This book strikes me as a professor's course notes and slides tidied up just enough to make a presentable, if not exactly readable published book. Landscape ecology is still a young field, so there aren't so many compatitors yet, but still I'd bet there are better resources published on this subject.
An excellent overview of the main principles of landscape ecology with relevant examples for land-use planners. If you are new to landscape ecology and would like to delve a bit deeper, I recommend reading Landscape Ecology in Theory and Practice: Pattern and Process by Turner et al.