ADVANCED LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY (879)

Zoology/Forest/Botany 879

Monica G. Turner

 

Readings–Spring 2008

 

 

Texts [Available at University Bookstore or on Amazon.com]

 

Turner, M. G., R. H. Gardner, and R. V. O’Neill.  2001.  Landscape ecology in theory and practice.  Springer-Verlag, New York. This will be used as background material and also for the quantitative analyses component of the course.

Gergel, S. E. and M. G. Turner, editors.  2002. Learning landscape ecology.  Springer-Verlag, New York.  This book will be used for our lab exercises.

 

 

Weekly Discussion Readings [Electronic Reserves]

 

Friday, January 25 – Scope of landscape ecology, conceptual issues, scale, foundations

Background for lecture:

Turner, M. G.  2005.  Landscape ecology: what is the state of the science?  Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics. [My perspective on the more recent progress in landscape ecology.]

For discussion—some recent perspectives on L.E. from different angles:

Kent, M. 2007. Biogeography and landscape ecology. Progress in Physical Geography 31:345-355. [Perspectives from a British geographer.]

Fu, B-j and Y-h Lu. 2006. The progress and perspectives of landscape ecology in China. Progress in Physical Geography 30:232-244. [Much of the literature from China is not in English, thus this paper provides a valuable insight into the rapid development of landscape ecology in China.]

 

Wednesday, January 30 – Causes of landscape pattern

Black, A. E., P. Morgan, and P. F. Hessburg.  2003.  Social and biophysical correlates of change in forest landscapes of the interior Columbia Basin, USA.  Ecological Applications 13(1):51-67. [Reflects the current trend toward examining a wide range of factors associated with or predictive of landscape change, particularly with human land uses.]

Ernoult, A., S Freire-Diaz, E. Langlois and D. Alard. 2006. Are similar landscapes the results of similar histories? Landscape Ecology 21:631-639. [Makes the point that similar sites could have developed from different histories, and similarly, similar initial patterns could produce different trajectories.]

Schulte, L. A., D. J. Mladenoff, T. R. Crow, Laura C. Merrick, and D. T. Cleland. 2007.  Homogenization of northern U.S. Great Lakes forests due to land use.  Landscape Ecology 22:1089-1103. [What about when some drivers cause a reduction, rather than an increase, in spatial heterogeneity?]

 


Friday, February 1 – Landscape ecology comes of age (extended discussion)

SPECIAL FEATURE—LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY.  2005.  Ecology 86(8):1965-2017. [This special feature was designed to present the current state of landscape ecology, focusing on a selected set of issues.]

Fortin, M-J and A. A. Agrawal. 2005. Landscape ecology comes of age.  Ecology 86:1965–1966.

Turner, M. G.  2005. Landscape ecology in North America: past, present and future.  Ecology 86:1967–1974.

Wagner, H. H. and M-J Fortin.  2005. Spatial analysis of landscapes: concepts and statistics.  Ecology 86:1975–1987.

Bélisle, M.  2005. Measuring landscape connectivity: the challenge of behavioral landscape ecology.  Ecology 86:1988–1995.

Urban, D. L. 2005. Modeling ecological processes across scales. Ecology 86:1996–2006.

Burgman, M. A., D. B. Lindenmayer, and J. Elith. 2005. Managing landscape for conservation under uncertainty.  Ecology 86:2007–2017.

 

Wednesday, February 6 – Long-term landscape development

Jackson, S. T.  2006. Vegetation, environment and time: the origination and termination of ecosystems. Journal of Vegetation Science 17:547-557.

Baker R.G., E. A. Bettis, D. P. Schwert, D. G. Horton, C. A. Chumbley, L. A. Gonzalez, and M. K. Reagan.  1996. Holocene paleoenvironments of northeast Iowa.  Ecological Monographs 66 (2): 203-234.  [Landscapes change a lot over long time periods; understanding of these changes comes from paleoecological studies, this being an excellent example from the Midwest.]

Dupouey, J. L., E. Dambrine, J. D. Laffite and C. Moares.  2002.  Irreversible impact of past land use on forest soils and biodiversity.  Ecology 83:2978-2984. [European example that looks over a very long time period; focuses on the effects of agriculture.  Example of recent focus on the effects of land-use legacies on state of contemporary ecosystems.]

Faison, E. K., D. R. Foster, W. W. Oswald, B. C. S. Hansen and E Doughty. 2006. Early Holocene openlands in southern New England. Ecology 87:2537-2547. [Recent paper from the Harvard Forest research team addressing a particular element of the landscape and providing the long-term context for understanding its occurrence.]

 

Wednesday, February 13 – Quantifying pattern

Good background:

Li, H., and J. F. Reynolds.  1995.  On definition and quantification of heterogeneity.  Oikos 73:280-284. [Nice conceptual treatment of heterogeneity; older paper, but good food for thought on what is being quantified.]

Gustafson, E. J.  1998. Quantifying landscape spatial pattern: What is the state of the art?  Ecosystems 1:143-156. [Relatively recent article addressing spatial analyses recognizing both categorical and continuous measures.]

For discussion:

Li, H.  and J. Wu. 2004. Use and misuse of landscape indices.  Landscape Ecology 19:389-399. [Recent synthesis of issues associated with quantifying landscape patterns.]

Teixido, N., J. Garrabou, J. Gutt and W. E. Arntz.  2007.  Iceberg disturbance and successional spatial patterns: the case of the shelf Antarctic benthic communities. Ecosystems 10:142-157. [Nice example of an more unusual landscape in which landscape metrics are applied, and also an example of taking a multivariate analysis approach to multiple metrics.]

Dorner, B., K. Lertzman and J. Fall. 2002.  Landscape pattern in topographically complex landscapes: issues and techniques for analysis.  Landscape Ecology 17:729-743.  [Recent paper addresses some of the challenges associated with applying landscape metrics.]

Fall, A., M.-J. Fortin, M. Manseau, and D. O’Brien. 2007. Spatial graphs: principles and applications for habitat connectivity. Ecosystems 10:448-461. [Thinking outside the patch: spatial application of graph theory, offering a different perspective on spatial pattern analysis with a sample application.]

 

Wednesday, February 20 – Quantifying pattern, cont’d

Wu, J. 2004. Effects of changing scale on landscape pattern analysis: scaling relations.  Landscape Ecology 19:125-138. [Recent paper dealing with effects of scale change on landscape metrics; there is a larger body of literature, and this is an important practical consideration for all studies using landscape metrics.]

Fortin, M-J, B. Boots, F. Csillag and T. K. Remmel.  2003. On the role of spatial stochastic models in understanding landscape indices.  Oikos 102:203-212. [Lays out an approach for interpreting landscape metrics numerically.]

Remmel TK, F. Csillag. 2003. When are two landscape pattern indices significantly different? J. Geograph. Syst. 5:331-351. [Addresses the key issue of statistical significance when comparing metrics, which has been problematic in many studies.]

Cardille, J. A., M. G. Turner, M. Clayton, S. Price, and S. E. Gergel. 2005. METALAND:  Characterizing spatial patterns and statistical context of landscape metrics.  BioScience 55:983-988. [Presents a framework for examining the spatial pattern of metric values, along with multivariate approaches.]

 

Wednesday, February 27 – Spatial statistics

Bolstad, PV, Swank W, Vose J.  1998.  Predicting Southern Appalachian overstory vegetation with digital terrain data.  Landscape Ecology 13:271-283. [Uses both spatial stats and other predictive models to extrapolate forest community composition to the landscape of Coweeta; nice comparison of some different methods.]

Schwarz, P. A., T. J. Fahey and C. E. McCullouch. 2003. Factors controlling spatial variation of tree species abundance in a forested landscape.  Ecology  84:1862-1878. [Uses semivariograms to understand mechanisms driving tree species patterns.]

Murwira A, and Skidmore A. K. 2005. The response of elephants to the spatial heterogeneity of vegetation in a Southern African agricultural landscape. Landscape Ecology 20:217-234. [Somewhat lengthy, but illustrates use of semivariograms to examine relationship between animals and habitat.]

Mayor, S. J., J. A. Schaefer, D. C. Schneider and S. P. Mahoney. 2007. Spectrum of selection: new approaches to detecting the scale-dependent response to habitat. Ecology 88:1634-1640. [Habitat selection has been a major theme in organism-landscape studies for several years; this is an example of a sophisticated scale-dependent approach using spatial statistics.]

 


Wednesday, March 5 – Landscape models

Perry, G. L. W. and N. J. Enright.  2006. Spatial modeling of vegetation change in dynamic landscapes: a review of methods and applications. Progress in Physical Geography 30:47-72. [Nice recent review of landscape models.]

Strayer DL, Ewing HA, Bigelow S. 2003. What kind of spatial and temporal details are required in models of heterogeneous systems? Oikos 102:654-62. [Excellent treatment of the issues associated with introducing spatial complexity into models.]

Gardner, R. H. and D. L. Urban. 2007. Neutral models for testing landscape hypotheses. Landscape Ecology 22:15-29. [Gardner was lead author of the original neutral landscape model paper; this is a nice summary of the current state of those models.]

Minor, E. S. and D. L. Urban. 2007. Graph theory as a proxy for spatially explicit population models in conservation planning. Ecology 17:1771-1782. [Urban has been a key contributor to new quantitative approaches in landscape ecology, and this is a type of model quite different from many that you will read about.]

 

Wednesday, March 12 – Disturbance and landscapes

Perry, G. L. W.  2002.  Landscapes, space and equilibrium:  shifting viewpoints.  Progress in Physical Geography 26(3):339-359.  [Synthesis of an issue of long-term interest and importance in ecology.]

Leroux, S. J., F. K. A. Schmiegelow, R. B. Lessard and S. G. Cumming. 2007. Minimum dynamic reserves: a framework for determining reserve size in ecosystems structured by large disturbances. Biological Conservation 138:464-473. [Recent paper continuing the discussion of reserve design in the face of disturbance, and approaches that integrate across a wide variety of disturbance types.]

Kulakowski, D. and T. T. Veblen. 2007. Effect of prior disturbances on the extent and severity of wildfire in Colorado subalpine forests. Ecology 88:759-769. [Interaction between multiple disturbances, which is just starting to get some reasonable attention.]

Allen, C. D. 2007. Interactions across spatial scales among forest dieback, fire, and erosion in northern New Mexico landscapes. Ecosystems 10:797-808.  [Consideration of interactions among disturbances, considered in the context of cross-scale interactions.]

 

Friday, March 14 – Landscape ecology, climate change, disease (extended discussion)

[This is an emerging area focused on how spatial heterogeneity can affect disease incidence in plants, animals and people. Literature is developing in both the ecological arena and also the epidemiology arena.]

Ostfeld, R. S., G. E. Glass and F. Keesing.  2006. Spatial epidemiology: an emerging (or re-emerging) discipline. TREE 20(6):328-336.

Holdenrieder, O., M. Pautasso, P. J. Weisberg and D. Lonsdale.  2004. Tree diseases and landscape processes: the challenge of landscape pathology. TREE 19(8):446-452.

Plantegenest, M., C. Le May, and F. Fabre. 2007. Landscape epidemiology of plant diseases. J. R. Soc. Interface 4:963-972.

Despommier D, Ellis BR, Wilcox BA. 2006. The role of ecotones in emerging infectious diseases. Ecohealth 3(4): 281-289.

Brownstein, J. S., D. K. Skelly, T. R. Holford, and D. Fish. 2005. Forest fragmentation predicts local scale heterogeneity of Lyme disease risk. Oecologia 146:469-475.

Jackson LE, Hilborn ED, Thomas JC. 2006. Towards landscape design guidelines for reducing Lyme disease risk. International Journal of Epidemiology 35 (2): 315-322.

 

Wednesday, March 26 – Organisms and landscapes

Murphy, H.T. and J. Lovett-Doust. 2004. Context and connectivity in plant metapopulations and landscape mosaics: does the matrix matter? Oikos 105:3-14. [It isn’t just the patches that are important! Also a nice comparison of metapopulation and landscape approaches.]

Henry, M., J-M. Pons and J-F. Cosson.  2007.  Foraging behavior of a frugivorous bat helps bridge landscape connectivity and ecological processes in a fragmented rainforest. Journal of Animal Ecology 76:801-813. [Recent paper with an organism-specific functional approach to landscape connectivity; tropical; integrates measures of landscape with movement data.]

Hebblewhite, M., E. H. Merrill and T. L. McDonald. 2005. Spatial decomposition of predation risk using resource selection functions: an example in a wolf-elk predator-prey system. Oikos 111:101-111. [Paper decomposing spatial risk of predation on the landscape, focusing on how spatial heterogeneity influences different components of the pred-prey interaction.]

Dormann, C. F., O. Schweiger, I. Augenstein and many others. 2007. Effects of landscape structure and land-use intensity on similarity of plant and animal communities. Global Ecology and Biogeography 16:774-787. [Example of recent studies moving beyond single-species analysis to consider communities.]

 

Wednesday, April 2 – Spatial heterogeneity and ecosystem processes

Jenerette, D. G. and J. Wu. 2004. Interactions of ecosystem processes with spatial heterogeneity in the puzzle of nitrogen limitation.  Oikos 107:273-282. [Understanding the spatial heterogeneity of biogeochemical processes—causes, consequences, scales of variability, etc.—is still in its infancy. This paper attempts to link spatial patterns to N cycing.]

Groffman PM, Pouyat RV, Cadenasso ML, et al. 2006. Land use context and natural soil controls on plant community composition and soil nitrogen and carbon dynamics in urban and rural forests. Forest Ecology and Management 236:177-192. [Comparing the relative effects of different factors on soil processes in forests.]

Bennett EM, Carpenter SR, Clayton MK. 2005. Soil phosphorus variability: scale-dependence in an urbanizing agricultural landscape. Landscape Ecology 20: 389-400. [Local example for the Lake Mendota watershed, where P is the element of importance in land-lake interactions.]

Burcher, C. L., H. M. Valett and E. F. Benfield.  2007. The land-cover cascade: relationships coupling land and water.  Ecology 88:228-242. [Connecting the dots from land-cover change, as it interacts with other abiotic factors, to adjacent stream systems; also lays out some new approaches for analysis.]

 

Wednesday, April 16 – Applied  landscape ecology (invasives, land-use change)

With, K. A. 2002. The landscape ecology of invasive spread. Conservation Biology 16:1192-1203. [Conceptual paper using neutral landscape models to reason through the implications of landscape structure for the spread of an invasive species.]

Kumar, S., T. J. Stohlgren and G. W. Chong. 2006. Spatial heterogeneity influences native and nonnative plant species richness. Ecology 87:3186-3199.  [Nice paper showing that incorporation of landscape variables always improved the models.]

Pejchar L, Morgan PM, Caldwell MR, et al. 2007. Evaluating the potential for conservation development: Biophysical, economic, and institutional perspectives. Conservation Biology 21: 69-78. [Draws in part on lessons from landscape ecology to examine alternative development patterns and effects on biodiversity.]

Lindenmayer, D., R. J. Hobbs, R. Montague-Drake, and many others. 2008. A checklist for ecological management of landscapes for conservation. Ecology Letters 11:78-91. [Includes some of the leading landscape ecologists in Australia, nice synthesis of landscape concepts and their application to conservation.]

 

Friday, April 18 – Emerging directions (landscape ecology and ecosystem services)

Cumming GS. 2007. Global biodiversity scenarios and landscape ecology. Landscape Ecology 22: 671-685.

Kreme, C., N. M. Williams, M. A. Aizen and 17 other authors. 2007. Pollination and other ecosystem services produced by mobile organisms: a conceptual framework for the effects of land-use change. Ecology Letters 10:299-314.

Swift, M. G., A.-M. N. Izac, and M. van Noordwijk.  2004.  Biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes–are we asking the right questions? Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 104:113-134.

Tscharntke, T., A. M. Klein, A. Kruess, I. Steffan-Dewenter and C. Thies.  2005. Landscape perspectives on agricultural intensification and biodiversity—ecosystem service management. Ecology Letters 8:857-874.

 

Wednesday, April 23 – Emerging directions (landscape genetics)

Manel, S., M. K. Schwartz, G. Luikart and P. Taberlet.  2003.  Landscape genetics:  combining landscape ecology and population genetics.  Trends in Ecology and Evolution 18:189-197. [The recent developments in genetics offer an enormous opportunity to evaluate factors like relatedness and dispersal patterns in landscapes.  This has really taken off among ecologists in Europe.]

Holderegger, R. and H. H. Wagner. 2006. A brief guide to landscape genetics. Landscape Ecology 21:793-796. [Introduction to a special feature.]

Hoderegger, R., U. Kamm and F. Gugerli. 2006. Adaptive vs. neutral genetic diversity: implications for landscape genetics. Landscape Ecology 21:797-807. [Explanations of the genetics that work well for landscape ecologists.]

Storfer, A., M. A. Murphy, J. S. Evans, C. S. Goldberg, S. Robinson, S. F. Spear, R. Dezzani, E. Delmelle, L. Vierling and L. P. Watts. 2007. Putting the ‘landscape’ in landscape genetics. Heredity 98:128-142. [Highlighting the spatial developments that are relevant for genetics, and what might develop from the merger.]

 

Friday, April 25 – Future directions

TO BE ANNOUNCED.