Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
Introduction
The science of landscape ecology is especially dependent on high-quality data because often it focuses on broad-scale patterns and processes and deals in the long term. Likewise, high quality data are necessary as the basis for building policy. When issues, such as climate change, can induce international political and economic consequences, it becomes clear that providing high-quality, long-term data is paramount. It is not an accident that this chapter is positioned near the front of this book. Of the priority research topics presented in this book, this is the most pervasive across other topics because the availability of high-quality data limits progress in other realms. Be it historic land-use data needed to understand the dynamics of land-use change, the independent data of varying scales needed to assess scaling phenomena or test new metrics, the socioeconomic/cultural data needed to integrate humans into landscape ecology, or the biological and population data needed to evaluate ecological flows, the quality of raw data, metadata, and derived data products is critical to the core of landscape ecology. For each of these key topics and perspectives, the availability and quality of data will affect research results and practical recommendations.
Data advances in past two decades
It has been two decades since the 1983 workshop that many say established the landscape ecology field in North America (Risser et al. 1984).
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