34 - Toward fostering recognition of landscape ecology

Summary

The volume of essays (Wiens and Moss, 1999) produced for distribution at the Fifth World Congress of IALE, the International Association for Landscape Ecology, generated a good deal of interest and comment. What has now emerged from that original collection of essays is this expanded and updated version. The essay I contributed to the original volume (Moss, 1999) contained my personal observations on the status of the field of landscape ecology and the role played by IALE, academic institutions and practitioners in advancing the field. Now, five years later, it is perhaps appropriate to re-examine these comments and to make some reassessment of how the profile of landscape ecology may have changed amongst its adherents, within the scientific community at large, within academic institutions, and amongst those practitioners who apply its ideas to solving environmental problems.

In the 1999 essay my main argument focused on the need for a clear understanding of what “landscape” means to landscape ecologists (see also Moss, 2000). One of the major problems I saw then was the need to bring together into this focus the “two solitudes” within landscape ecology: the geoecological and the bioecological traditions. Since that time this same issue has been raised by several commentators. Bastian (2001) has added a great deal to this debate, starting from a historical perspective, and Opdam et al. (2002) expanded the discussion to the context of landscape-ecological input to spatial planning.