Landscape ecology: perspectives based on the 2007 IALE world congress

Sixty-nine years since Carl Troll first coined the term ‘‘landscape ecology’’, 25 years of existence of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE), and 20 years since the first issue of the journal Landscape Ecology, can we now consider landscape ecology a more mature science? This question was discussed at a roundtable during the 2007 IALE World Congress. As one of the invited speakers, I read carefully all 401 abstracts of the open sessions and symposia of the congress, and analysed them in a quantitative way based on the following criteria: country of origin, technologies used for spatial quantification, organizational level (such as population, community, ecosystem), cross-disciplinarity (i.e. multi-, interor transdisciplinarity; for definitions, see Fry et al. 2007), temperate versus tropical landscapes, habitat modification, type of landscape, spatial and temporal scales, kind of human disturbance, main research topics as per Wu and Hobbs’s (2002) classification. Several interesting patterns emerged from this analysis which may help us to identify critical issues in the development of landscape ecology. First, who are doing landscape ecology? Studies from 59 countries were presented at the 2007 IALE World Congress. Half the studies came from researchers in seven countries and four different continents: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Spain, and China (Fig. 1). This distribution is quite different from that of papers published in international journals. A survey in the Thomson Institute for Scientific Information (ISI; http://www.portal.isiknowledge.com/) using the words ‘‘ecology’’ and ‘‘landscape’’ showed that almost half the papers published between 1995 and 2005 came from North American researchers (Fig. 1). The comparison per country between IALE and ISI showed that the international literature is dominated by the USA and then by Canada. This can lead to an unbalanced representation of different approaches in landscape ecology. Among the manuscripts compiled in the ISI database, for example, the frequency of the words ‘‘model’’, ‘‘scale’’, ‘‘conservation’’ and ‘‘ecosystem’’ in abstracts, titles and keywords of North American and Canadian papers is higher than that from other countries, suggesting that the scope of the studies developed in the USA and Canada differs from that of other countries. Since the emphases or approaches of landscape ecology vary among different regions, and even within countries (see for example the Russian school, the more pragmatic Australian perspective, or the Dutch planning and management approach), the development of this science would benefit from a more balanced distribution of publications from different regions/countries, offering the opportunity to discuss a wider range of perspectives in landscape ecology. J. P. Metzger (&) Department of Ecology, Institute of Bioscience, University of Sao Paulo, Rua do Matao, 321, travessa 14, 05508-900 Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil e-mail: jpm@ib.usp.br