Ecology, Cognition and Landscape

While the importance of incorporating human factors into understanding ecological process is widely recognized, to date there have been few solutions offered as to how this can be done. In his new book, Ecology, Cognition and Landscape, Almo Farina makes an innovative move to do just that. And by reinterpreting both the ecological and social strands of landscape ecology, within a common framework based on cognition, he offers a way to make the necessary connections between the social and natural systems.

Following the success of his widely popular Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology, Farina's new book builds on well-established theories to present his new ideas, explaining both in a way which is accessible to readers from both the natural and social sciences. By focusing on the relationships between human populations, human societies and environmental processes, the book provides the reader with a new approach for exploring and connecting the various aspects of ecological complexity.

Ecology, Cognition and Landscape will be an important and accessible reference for graduate students and researchers interested in all aspects of landscape studies, including ecologists, architects, agronomists, social scientists, environmental psychologists, and those exploring the economic, political and educational dimensions of both rural and urban landscapes.

Klappentext

It is more and more evident that our living system is completely disturbed by human intrusion. Such intrusion affects the functioning of entire systems in ways we do not yet fully understand. We use paradigms such as the disturbance to cover large and deep gaps in our scienti?c knowledge. Human ecology is an uncertain terrain for anthropologists, geographers, and ecologists and rarely is expanded to include the social and economic realms. The integration of different disciplines and the application of their many paradigms to problems of environmental complexity remains a distant goal despite the many efforts that have been made to achieve it. Philosophical and semantic barriers are erected when such integration is pursued by pioneering scientists. Recently, evolutionary ecology has shown great interest in the spatial processes well described by the emerging discipline of landscape ecology. But this interest takes the form of pure curiosity or at worst, of skepticism toward the real capacity of landscape ecology to contribute to the advancement of ecological science. The past two centuries have been characterized by huge changes occurring in the entire ecosphere. Global changes are the effects of human intervention at a planetary scale, with consequent degradation of the environment creating an e- logical debt for future generations. On the other side of the issue, new technologies have improved the welfare of billions of people and have given hope to many other billions that they may also see such improvement in the near future.

Inhalt

Introduction.- 1. The state of the art of the landscape ecology: 20 years of paradigms and methods.- 2. Toward the essence of the landscape: An epistemological perspective.- 3. Toward a theory of mosaic.- 4. Properties of the mosaics.- 5. The ontogenesis of the landscape: A probabilistic view.- 6. Ecotones.- 7. Measuring and evaluating the ecological mosaics.- 8. The cognitive landscape and the theory of resources.- 9. The landscape as a human agency.- Epilogue; Jan Boagaert.- Index.-