Landscape Ecology is a rapidly growing science of quantifying the ways in which ecosystems interact and or establish links between activities in one region and repercussions in another. This book, which will serve as a general introduction to this relatively new and emerging area of study, takes what the authors call a "top-down approach" i.e., believing that context is equally as important as content and that an isolated, dismembered landscape fragment will lose biodiversity. This is in contrast to past and current ecosystem studies which have not focused on outside influences. The authors argue that the most detailed mathematical models of all the biodiversity within a landscape will not suffice to predict the outcome of management practices if the contextual analysis reveals that human impacts outside the landscape are contributing to a reserve's ultimate demise. The authors will demonstrate, via the material presented in this book, that protecting disconnected vignettes of nature in isolated national parks and reserves or saving so-called "hot-spots" of biodiversity simply will not work.
