A brief history and overview of landscape ecology

Landscape ecology is an interdisciplinary science that incorporates elements of ecology, geography, and social science to investigate how interactions between landscape form and process determine how landscapes function over space and time. This chapter provides a brief overview of the discipline, the history of its development, and geographical variations in foci. It then explores the semantics and definitions of key terms in landscape ecology before ending with a discussion of some of the key strengths and weaknesses of a landscape ecology approach