The Network Newsletter Vol. Li is mathematical and theoretical ecologist and director of the Ecological Modeling Lab at the University of New Mexico Department of Biology. His main research interest is ecological modeling and systems theory, and recent work has emphasized ecological scaling, spatio-temporal modeling techniques, energetic and thermodynamic foundations of ecological dynamics, and application of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems theories to multiple scale ecology. When considering this article, Patty turned to Larry again and again for clarification on this difficult material, producing this conversation.
Landscape ecology is a way of thinking about the evolution and dynamics of heterogeneous landscapes.
The core of landscape ecology is viewed as the body of knowledge or facts about ecological space, spatial heterogeneity, and scaling. Traditionally, landscape ecology has resorted to reductionism, borrowing models from other sciences because it has not formulated its own basic theories. In the reductionism tradition, landscape ecology studies have been dominated by taking things apart and individually characterizing various attributes of spatial patterns. But shortfalls in reductionism are increasingly apparent. In terms of how biomolecules work, for example, reductionism has been used successfully to examine the components, but not the complex interactions between the components.