Reflecting upon 25 years of landscape ecology

The 7th World Congress of International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE) was held in Wageningen from July 9 to 12, 2007. More than 700 landscape ecologists, coming from all continents, participated. Amongst them were several ‘founding fathers’ of the modern landscape ecology and also many young researchers just starting their academic careers. In the background of the congress logo appeared symbolically the ‘‘25 years’’ of landscape ecology. Certainly, IALE was founded in Piestány (Slovakia) in 1982, but the spirit was already in the air long before. Carl Troll introduced the term for the first time in 1939. He considered landscape ecology as ‘‘a perfect marriage between geography and biology’’. The Veldhoven meeting in 1981, where the rebirth of landscape ecology after the Second World War was initiated, was the first international and interdisciplinary happening, and I am still convinced this was the most important momentum in landscape research in general. There, scholars of all kind of disciplines were actively involved, searching for something new, in fact a solution, because, as Michael Moss formulated it, ‘‘quite clearly, existing approaches that sought to address a whole range of landscape scale environmental issues were proving to be inadequate’’ (Moss 1999, p. 138). Many things happened in these 25 years. Did landscape ecology achieve maturity in this ‘first generation’ and did it become an active player in modern society? Three aspects come to my mind. First, how do other disciplines see landscape ecology? What makes landscape ecology distinctive? Next, how did landscape ecology develop in relation to its societal context? Finally, what is landscape ecology still struggling with? Nowadays, many disciplines are involved in landscape research and not everyone is considering oneself as a landscape ecologist. In some cases it is clear that the term ‘ecology’ gives a bias of ‘too much’ biology or biogeography. Some prefer ‘landscape science’ instead. Nevertheless, many other disciplines recognise as distinctive features of landscape ecology: concepts of patches, corridors, holons, connectivity, and a wide variety of abstract landscape metrics. Certainly, the introduction of the patchcorridor-matrix model was fundamentally original, as it allowed simple modelling of complex landscapes using spatial analysis. These techniques were already developed in geography, but remained mainly theoretical because the technical tools and digital data were still missing then. Only with the rapid development of GIS and remote sensing did the development of practical applications become possible. Landscape ecologists took the opportunity and this resulted in the general use of modelling and landscape metrics in the study of landscape patterns and processes. Fundamental and theoretical work M. Antrop (&) Geography Department, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281 S8, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: marc.antrop@ugent.be