This book provides a comprehensive description of the landscape-ecological planning system LANDEP, and introduces the methodical procedure. LANDEP was developed at the Institute of Landscape Ecology of Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and has been applied in various planning processes at home and abroad. Despite the fact that the LANDEP methodology was defined in 1979, the methodological content, sequence of procedures and the application of concept in practice are still valid. The first two steps – analyses and syntheses – have the nature of fundamental research and result in the design and characteristics of complex landscape-ecological-spatial units. The final two steps – evaluations and proposals – address the needs of planning practice. The intermediate step – interpretations – has the character of applied research and forms the arguments and criteria for the assessment of landscape for its utilisation by humans.

Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003 Ecological planning is the process of understanding, evaluating, and providing options for the use of landscape to ensure a better fit with human habitation. In this ambitious analysis, Forster Ndubisi provides a succinct historical and comparative account of the various approaches to this process. He then reveals how each of these approaches offers different and uniquely useful perspectives for understanding the dialogue between human and environmental processes. Ndubisi begins by examining the philosophies behind and major contributors to ecological thinking during the past 150 years, as well as the paradigm shift in planning that occurred in recent decades as a result of a growing global ecological awareness. He then turns to landscape suitability analysis and discusses alternative approaches to ecological planning, such as applied human ecology, applied landscape ecology, and others. Finally, he offers a comparative synthesis of the approaches in order to reveal the theoretical and methodological assumptions inherent when planners choose one approach over the other. Ndubisi concludes that no one approach can by itself adequately address the whole spectrum of ecological planning issues. For this reason he offers guidance as to when it may be appropriate for landscape architects and planners to emphasize one approach rather than another.

In the preface to the softcover edition of this book in 1989, we stated: Since the publication of the first edition of this book, landscape ecology has made great strides. It has overcome its continental isolation and has also established itself in the English-speaking world. By attracting both problem inquiry and problem-solving-oriented scientists with different cultural, academic, and profes sional backgrounds from all over the world, it has broadened not only its geo graphical but also its conceptual and methodological scopes. We are pleased to confirm in 1993 that the growth of landscape ecology continues, and to again express our gratification at the encouraging re sponse to this first English-language monograph on the subject and its contribution to these developments. As before, we feel special satisfac tion that it has reached not only the shelves of libraries and academic re searchers, but that it has also appealed to professional practitioners, teachers, and their students from industrialized and developing countries, embracing the broad range of fields related to landscape ecology in the natural sciences as well as in the humanities.

Landscape Ecology is an emerging science of gaining momentum over the past few decades in the scientific as well as in the planning-management worlds. Although the field is rooted in biology and geography, the approaches to understanding the ecology of a landscape are highly divers. This hybrid vigor provides power to the field. One can no longer view a local ecosystem or land use in isolation from global areas and time frames. The surrounding landscape mosaic and the flows and movements in a landscape must be considered, especially the linkage between humans requiring resources provided by nature, the constraints on their use as well as the responding landscape.

The landscape we see and live in is an important part or our everyday lives, be they urban or rural. Environmental concern has grown in recent years, as a result of public awareness of the detrimental impact industry, transport and tourism can have on the ecosystem. This book examines the role of the new technologies of geographical information systems and remote sensing as media for the study of landscape, as they provide tools of unprecedented power which collect, store, manipulate and analyze data so as to support and assist the decisions which the environmental scientist, ecologist, zoologist and botanist make.; "Landscape Ecology and Geographical Information Systems" is international in scope, provides an overview of operational applications, and offers experiences in the form of case studies of applications to vegetation, animals, and hydrology. The book is organized into four sections. It - provides an overview of the uses of GIS and RSS in landscape ecology; debates conceptual issues such applications throw up; considers analytical techniques and technical issues; and offers experiences in the form of Case Studies On Plant, Abiotic And Animal Landscape Ecology.

Based on both research and practical experience,Ecological Landscape Design and Planning offers a holistic methodological approach to landscape design and planning. It focuses on the scarcity of natural resources in the Mediterranean and the need to aim for long-term ecological stability and environmental sustainability. The principles of this approach, therefore, can be used as a theoretical foundation for holistic landscape research, creative ecological design and better sustainable practice development.

This book provides guidelines for those pursuing landscape projects based on integrative concepts – interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity – whether they are members of an integrative research team or individuals working on a problem that demands integration. They must define terminology, choose appropriate methodologies, overcome epistemological barriers and cope with the high expectations of some stakeholders while encouraging others to participate at all.

The book analyses the landscape as a geosystem in all its complexity (from the abiotic environment, and land use to socio-economic character) as an integrated natural resource, as society’s life space, as well as an object of planning and decision making on sustainable land use. It presents the landscape properties in the form of databases that comply with the INSPIRE Directive 2007/2/EC (INSPIRE – Infrastructure for Spatial InfoRmation in Europe) requirements, which can be used for a variety of purposes and can serve as a national spatial information database for the needs of applied landscape-ecological research and real-world spatial planning processes. The book also provides overview legends with complete domain values of selected attributes of all three landscape structures (primary, secondary and tertiary) routinely used in Slovakia. Lastly, the book offers an example of the construction and mapping of geocomplexes as well as the database creation on the model territory at the regional level.