This is an ecology textbook focused on key principles that underpin research and management at the landscape scale. It covers (1) agents of pattern (the physical template, biotic processes, and disturbance regimes); (2) scale and pattern (why scale matters, how to ‘scale’ with data, and inferences using landscape pattern metrics); and (3) implications of pattern (for metapopulations, communities and biodiversity, and ecosystem processes). The last two chapters address emerging issues: urban landscapes, and adapting to climate change. This book stems from two graduate-level courses in Landscape Ecology taught at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. The subject has evolved over time, from a concepts-based overview of what landscape ecology is, to a more applied practicum on how one does landscape ecology. As landscape ecology has matured as a discipline, its perspectives on spatial heterogeneity and scale have begun to permeate into a wide range of other fields including conservation biology, ecosystem management, and ecological restoration. Thus, this textbook will bring students from diverse backgrounds to a common level of understanding and will prepare them with the practical knowledge for a career in conservation and ecosystem management.

Both fire and climatic variability have monumental impacts on the dynamics of temperate ecosystems. These impacts can sometimes be extreme or devastating as seen in recent El Nino/La Nina cycles and in uncontrolled fire occurrences. This volume brings together research conducted in western North and South America, areas of a great deal of collaborative work on the influence of people and climate change on fire regimes. In order to give perspective to patterns of change over time, it emphasizes the integration of paleoecological studies with studies of modern ecosystems. Data from a range of spatial scales, from individual plants to communities and ecosystems to landscape and regional levels, are included. Contributions come from fire ecology, paleoecology, biogeography, paleoclimatology, landscape and ecosystem ecology, ecological modeling, forest management, plant community ecology and plant morphology. The book gives a synthetic overview of methods, data and simulation models for evaluating fire regime processes in forests, shrublands and woodlands and assembles case studies of fire, climate and land use histories. The unique approach of this book gives researchers the benefits of a north-south comparison as well as the integration of paleoecological histories, current ecosystem dynamics and modeling of future changes.

When the Spanish colonized it in AD 1769, the California Coast was inhabited by speakers of no fewer than 16 distinct languages and an untold number of small, autonomous Native communities. These societies all survived by foraging, and ethnohistoric records show a wide range of adaptations emphasizing a host of different marine and terrestrial foods. Many groups exhibited signs of cultural complexity including sedentism, high population density, permanent social inequality, and sophisticated maritime technologies. The ethnographic era was preceded by an archaeological past that extends back to the terminal Pleistocene. Essays in this volume explore the last three and one half millennia of this long history, focusing on the archaeological signatures of emergent cultural complexity. Organized geographically, they provide an intricate mosaic of archaeological, historic, and ethnographic findings that illuminate cultural changes over time. To explain these Late Holocene cultural developments, the authors address issues ranging from culture history, paleoenvironments, settlement, subsistence, exchange, ritual, power, and division of labor, and employ both ecological and post-modern perspectives. Complex cultural expressions, most highly developed in the Santa Barbara Channel and the North Coast, are viewed alternatively as fairly recent and abrupt responses to environmental flux or the end-product of gradual progressions that began earlier in the Holocene.