Robert V. O'Neill – författare

Landscape ecology is not a distinct discipline or simply a branch of ecology, but rather is the synthetic intersection of many related disciplines that focus on the spatial-temporal pattern of the landscape. Risser et al. , 1984 The emergence of landscape ecology as a discipline has catalyzed a shift in paradigms among ecologists, . . . resource managers and land-use planners. Having now seen the faces of spatial pattern and scale . . . we can never go back to the old ways of viewing things. Wiens, 1999 his book presents the perspective of three ecologists on the concepts and Tapplications of landscape ecology, a discipline that has shown expansive growth during the past two decades. Although landscape ecology is a multidis- plinary subject involving components as diverse as economics and sociology, the earth sciences and geography, remote sensing and computer applications, we - cus here on what ecologists need to know about landscapes. Landscape ecology served as the integrating theme of our collaborative research for nearly 15 years, including a 7-year period during which we worked together at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We became acquainted in January 1986 at the first annual United States Landscape Ecology symposium held at the Univ- sity of Georgia and organized by Monica Turner and Frank Golley. Landscape ecology was, at that time, a new subject in the United States. The first U. S.

"Ecosystem" is an intuitively appealing concept to most ecologists, but, in spite of its widespread use, the term remains diffuse and ambiguous. The authors of this book argue that previous attempts to define the concept have been derived from particular viewpoints to the exclusion of others equally possible. They offer instead a more general line of thought based on hierarchy theory. Their contribution should help to counteract the present separation of subdisciplines in ecology and to bring functional and population/community ecologists closer to a common approach. Developed as a way of understanding highly complex organized systems, hierarchy theory has at its center the idea that organization results from differences in process rates. To the authors the theory suggests an objective way of decomposing ecosystems into their component parts. The results thus obtained offer a rewarding method for integrating various schools of ecology.