To understand the structure and function of ecosystems in details, not only on levels of communities, organization below that of ecosystem, such as, individual organism, population and also increasingly on levels above that of ecosystem, such as, landscape, ecoregional or biome, and global levels should be recognized. Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines landscape as “the land forms of a region in the aggregate”.
Landscape ecology is supposed to originate in late 1930s, when Carl Troll (1939) noted that all methods of natural science are captured in area of landscape science (Schreiber, 1990) and became widely recognized in central Europe in 1960s.
At International Association for Vegetation Science meeting in 1963, Troll (1968) defined landscape ecology following Tansley’s concept of ecosystem as study of entire complex cause effect network between living communities and their environmental conditions, which prevails in a specific section of landscape.
Image Source: fsd2010.org
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With general acceptance as a branch of modern ecology dealing with interrelationship between humans and both natural landscapes and human built techno-landscapes, landscape ecology provides a scientific basis for fields as design, planning, management, protection, conservation, and restoration and provides foundation for natural and human dominated land management at regional scale (Hansberger, 1994).
Landscapes change because of ongoing natural processes along with social, political, and economic processes. Landscape ecology deals with changing relationships and emphasizes landscape as a system and level of organization. Thus, understanding landscape -level patterns and processes, will help in understanding processes and phenomena occurring at organism, population, community, and ecosystem levels as well.