Table Of ContentWildlife and Landscape Ecology
Springer-Science+Business Media, LLC
John A. Bissonette
Editor
Wildlife and
Landscape Ecology
Effects of Pattern and Scale
With 115 Illustrations
Springer
lohn A. Bissonette
Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit
(U.S. Geologieal Survey-Biologieal Resourees Devision)
Department of Fisheries and Wildlife
College of Natural Resourees
Utah State University
Logan, UT 84322-5290, USA
E-mail:
Preface
The idea for this book began in 1992 when I began teaching a class in
landscape ecology for Fisheries and Wildlife graduate students at Utah
State University. During the summer as I was scanning the literature and
gathering material for the class, I was impressed that although there was a
growing body of excellent research in the discipline, there was no single
source where a graduate student or a wildlife manager could go for enlight-
enment on the underlying concepts, precepts, or theory that undergird
ecology writ large. The voluminous body of ecosystem-level literature
seemed to concentrate on but a few observation sets, i.e., nutrient cycling
and energy flow, setting the stage for much discordant discourse with
organism-based ecologists, much of which provided more heat than light
and contributed little towards a more pluralistic view of system dynamics. It
seemed to me that a significant contribution might be made by assembling
a series of papers that addressed scale issues in particular and landscape
ecology in general and that was directed towards the needs of wildlife
biologists and resource managers.
With this in mind I organized a symposium at the second Annual Meeting
of The Wildlife Society in Portland, Oregon in September of 1995. Attend-
ance was excellent, and I received numerous comments requesting a written
record of the papers presented. Although the papers presented at the
symposium concentrated on theory (Bissonette: Emergent Properties;
Milne: Fractal Landscapes; Peak: Taming Chaos; Pickett and Rogers: Patch
Dynamics; White and Harrod: Disturbance Regimes) and metrics (Hargis et
al.: Behavior of Landscape Metrics; Pearson and Gardner: Neutral Models),
upon reflection, I decided to invite additional papers on theory (Ritchie:
Metapopulation Dynamics; King: Hierarchy Theory) and to add a section
on application, i.e., how scale concepts have been used in real-life wildlife
studies (Bowyer, Van Ballenberghe and Kie: Foraging Behavior of Moose;
Cooke: Spatial View of Population Dynamics; Storch: Importance of Scale
Issues in the Conservation of Capercaillie; Turner, Pearson, Romme, and
Wallace: Important Spatial Scales for Ungulate Dynamics; Krausman:
Scale and Desert Bighorn Sheep Management; Bissonette, Harrison,
v
VI Preface
Hargis and Chapin: Scale-sensitive Properties Influence Marten Demo-
graphics). Carl Walters consented to contribute a paper on Adaptive Policy
Thinking to bridge the gap between ecology and management at larger
scales.
I realize that in this book, we have not covered all of the theoretical bases
for ecology conducted at larger scales. I doubt that any single volume can
do so. Rather, I have included papers on those issues that wildlife biologists
and managers will find important because they are confronted with the
management implications of them every day. The concepts, when digested
and integrated into the manager's ecological view of the world, should
provide a deeper understanding of how scale considerations impact how
resource management is done.
I am sensitive to the perception of many field biologists and managers
who are confronted with "putting out brush fires every day," i.e., crisis
management, that "theory is for academics; it provides little enlightenment
for my day-to-day activities." At the same time, it is evident that managers
come to the table with whatever academic learning they have gleaned in
college as well as a good deal of on-the-job knowledge. The school of hard
knocks, most often in a highly politicized atmosphere, makes realists out of
field biologists who may have been at one time, budding philosophers. I
sincerely respect and admire my colleagues in both federal and state agen-
cies who are the front line biologists and managers, and it is because I
realize that their job is not an easy one that this book came into being.
In a recent National Public Radio broadcast, aired in Logan, Utah in
October 1996, the commentator suggested that the useable knowledge base
that people need to make enlightened everyday decisions changes every 18
months. Even by the most conservative estimates, scientific knowledge is
doubling at a prodigious rate, perhaps every 3 to 5 years. Biologists who left
school only five years ago will be challenged by the current advancement in
ecology. The emergence of chaos theory and fractal geometry as way to
look at ecological complexity (chapters by Peak, Milne in this book) will be
new to most field biologists and managers, as will the ideas encompassed by
patch dynamics and disturbance regimes (chapters by Pickett and Rogers,
White and Harrod). As one example of new insights that mangers can gain
from understanding these new developments in ecology, Peak demon-
strates that a signature pattern, borrowed from chaos theory and recog-
nized in long-term population data, can provide a window of opportunity
for wildlife population control that can promote stability.
The new ideas encompassed by metapopulation dynamics (Ritchie chap-
ter) include explicit implications of scale and will change the way that the
field biologist and manager think about population dynamics. An underly-
ing premise of ecology conducted at larger scales is that landscape pattern
and processes mean something: they have impact on how individual ~rgan
isms interact with their environment. However, landscape ecology IS not
strictly synonymous with ecology at larger scales. There is much confusion
Preface vii
regarding scale and hierarchy level as the chapter by King points out. The
implications relate directly to interpolation across scales and across hierar-
chicallevels and the emergence of scale-sensitive properties. King's chapter
on hierarchy theory provides a most important conceptual foundation for
anyone interested in understanding ecology and management. Coupled
with my chapter on scale-sensitive properties, the message is about how we
can put confidence in the data we collect. Wildlife managers make decisions
regarding management based on studies and data bases relevant to the
problem. We try to provide some insight into what scale-sensitive measure-
ments and properties mean. It is perhaps most evident to wildlife managers
that adequate experimentation is difficult if not impossible to attain. The
chapters by Hargis et ai. and by Pearson and Gardner demonstrate an
approach on how to understand the effects of landscape pattern.
I hope that my agency colleagues, in particular, will appreciate the appli-
cations chapters. They represent examples by well-known and respected
wildlife biologists and ecologists to integrate scale concepts into field stud-
ies of wildlife species-the very kinds of studies that managers need to
incorporate into resource management decisions. The chapters by Bowyer
et aI., Turner et aI., Cooke, and Krausman address scale issues of ungulates;
the chapter by Storch provides a very nice assessment of the scale issues
involved in Capercaillie conservation in Central Europe; and I and my
coauthors Harrison, Hargis, and Chapin have written about the multiscale
influences on marten demographics. Because all natural resource managers
are involved in policy decisions at some level, I have included in this book
the chapter by Walters that addresses a rigorous approach to making man-
agement decisions.
Although this book is intended as an introduction to the underlying
concepts of landscape ecology for graduate students as well as managers
who work for both federal, state, and private resource agencies, it is written
at a level that will require serious reading. It will not be like reading a
newspaper or magazine, where what is read is instantly understood. Rather,
the intent of this book is to provide introductory but sophisticated chapters
that, in the words of Adler and Van Doren in their book How to Read a
Book, are intended to overcome the "initial inequality in understanding"
between writer and reader. As such, for some these chapters will take
concentrated and active reading. Hitting the intended target is always diffi-
cult with a diverse readership. The judgement of whether we have been
successful will rest with each individual reader.
JOHN A. BISSONEITE
Contents
Preface v
Contributors xi
Section 1 Underlying Concepts
1 Scale-Sensitive Ecological Properties: Historical Context,
Current Meaning 3
John A. Bissonette
2 Applications of Fractal Geometry in Wildlife Biology 32
Bruce T. Milne
3 Taming Chaos in the Wild: A Model-Free Technique for
Wildlife Population Control 70
David Peak
4 Patch Dynamics: The Transformation of Landscape Structure
and Function 101
S.T.A. Pickett and Kevin H. Rogers
5 Disturbance and Diversity in a Landscape Context 128
Peter S. White and Jonathan Harrod
6 Populations in a Landscape Context: Sources, Sinks, and
Metapopulations 160
Mark E. Ritchie
7 Hierarchy Theory: A Guide to System Structure for
Wildlife Biologists 185
Anthony W. King
ix
x Contents
Section 2 Landscape Metrics
8 Neutral Models: Useful Tools for Understanding Landscape
Patterns 215
S.M. Pearson and RH. Gardner
9 Understanding Measures of Landscape Pattern 231
C.D. Hargis, John A. Bissonette, and J.L. David
Section 3 Applications and Large-Scale Management
10 The Role of Moose in Landscape Process: Effects of
Biogeography, Population Dynamics, and Predation 265
RT. Bowyer, V. Van Ballenberghe, and J.G. Kie
11 A Spatial View of Population Dynamics 288
Jerry L. Cooke
12 The Importance of Scale in Habitat Conservation for an
Endangered Species: The Capercaillie in Central Europe 310
Use Storch
13 Landscape Heterogeneity and Ungulate Dynamics:
What Spatial Scales Are Inportant? 331
Monica G. Turner, S.M. Pearson, W.H. Romme,
and L.L. Wallace
14 The Influence of Landscape Scale on the Management of
Desert Bighorn Sheep 349
Paul R Krausman
15 The Influence of Spatial Scale and Scale-Sensitive Properties
in Habitat Selection by American Marten 368
John A. Bissonette, D.J. Harrison, C.D. Hargis, and
T.G. Chapin
16 Adaptive Policy Design: Thinking at Larger Spatial Scales 386
Carl J. Walters
395
Index
Contributors
John A. Bissonette Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research
Unit (U.S. Geological Survey-Biological Re-
sources Division), Department of Fisheries and
Wildlife, College of Natural Resources, Utah
State University, Logan, Utah 84322-5290,
USA, E-mail:
