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12 - Using landscape ecology to make sense of Australia's last frontier

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2010

By
David Bowman
Edited by
Jianguo Wu  and
Richard J. Hobbs
David Bowman
Affiliation:
Key Centre for TropicalWildlifeManagement, Northern Territory University, Darwin 0909, Australia
Jianguo Wu
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
Richard J. Hobbs
Affiliation:
Murdoch University, Western Australia
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Summary

Introduction

Just as the nineteenth century was a period of great biological discovery, driven by exploration and worldwide expansion of Western culture, there is no doubt that the dramatic global environment changes, driven by exploitation and pollution of the biosphere, will characterize the twenty-first century. A spin-off of the expansion of industrial civilization, that is driving the planetary environmental crisis, is the development and widespread availability of powerful digital technologies, such as geographic information systems, global positioning systems, digital aerial photography, and satellite imagery. These technologies provide unique insights into the rate and scale of environmental disturbances at the landscape-scale, which in aggregate drive global change. Natural resource managers and decision-makers tasked to achieve ecological sustainability necessarily focus on the landscape scale. Let us call the science that examines the ecological interaction between humans and landscapes landscape ecology (Naveh and Lieberman 1984). This discipline has the advantage of building on numerous other disciplines, including pure and applied physical and biological sciences and the more ambiguous, nuanced, and subtler fields in the humanities that have a stake in landscapes, including anthropology, environmental history, and various themes of human geography (Head 2001). Such a polyglot and young science is inherently vulnerable to bouts of introspection and anxiety about the conceptual bounds of the discipline and its philosophical roots (Wu and Hobbs 2002). I submit that the strength and utility of the transdisciplinary perspectives for making sense of and responding to global change is provided by landscape ecology.

Type
Chapter
Information
Key Topics in Landscape Ecology , pp. 214 - 226
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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