This week, landscape ecology and the application of GIS within the field was explored. Landscape ecology can be defined as a field that explores the importance of spatial patterning on the dynamics of interacting ecosystems. We learned with landscape ecology the landscape is the most important unit of study, where an area is spatially heterogeneous in at least one factor of interest, and is the scale at which management decisions and human effects are most commonly considered. Landscape ecology also has a fundamental assumption that the location of things can have important consequences on the surrounding environment. If spatial autocorrelation is shown by objects or events, patterns can develop from a response to an environmental factor (first-order process) or interactions between objects themselves (second-order process). Stationarity and scale are also important to landscape analysis as it measures how well patterns stay the same over space.
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