Until the 1970s landscapes were more often associated with painting than ecology. Picasso once joked that he needn't paint landscapes, nature did a better job. Even more oddly, thirty years ago a few ecologists began adopting the concepts of the modernist art period to help them describe landscapes and seascapes and big-sized environments. Both disciplines love contemplating the contrasts between edges and patches.
Parallels go much further.
Landscape ecologists similarly ponder patches such as beaver ponds in a watershed or forest groves dotted among evenly textured farmlands. To conservation biologists, for instance, the size and shape of a patch of forest may mean the difference between protection of a rare warbler's home or nest parasitism by cowbirds. Informed intuition serves both painters and naturalists well. The boundaries of the canvas have always bothered painters. One solution was the heavy gold frame.