In lecture we discussed how to approach landscape ecology and the key considerations used to study it. First, landscape ecology is all about the reciprocal interactions between the form of the landscape and the ecological processes occurring within the landscape. Ecological problems and processes are non-random because there is natural spatial autocorrelation happening because of the way landscapes or shaped. We discussed 1st order effects in landscape ecology, which occur when the underlying features of the land are creating the variability in observations from place to place. 2nd order effects also occur when the interactions between ecological forces form the land. Features and processes in landscape ecology can also exhibit stationarity if there is no differences over space (first order) or no interaction between objects or events (second order). The major types of processes that occur in landscape ecology can be summarized as abiotic, biotic, anthropogenic, and natural disturbances.

We ended this lecture with a brief mention of Brian’s work on fractals in landscape ecology. He mentioned there are many ways to explore the complexity and heterogeneity of a landscape, and that is what we will be doing in the first lab.