1 - Principles considered

Summary

The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile, those journeying atoms from the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world … Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travellers … They are the natural highways of all nations, not only levelling the ground and removing obstacles from the path of the traveller, quenching his thirst and bearing him on their bosoms, but conducting him through the most interesting scenery, the most populous portions of the globe, and where the animal and vegetable kingdoms attain their greatest perfection.

(Henry David Thoreau)

Recent work in international ecology has focused attention on an area called ‘Landscape Ecology’. Several recent symposia and books have pointed out a connection between the interaction of biotic and abiotic structures and functions and their spatial organization (Zonneveld 1990). In this book I will use some of the paradigms of landscape ecology to organize knowledge about riparian environments, and I will use that knowledge to assess those paradigms. While much of my approach will be toward ecological problems, I will also consider problems of a more broadly defined physical geography which are held in common with landscape ecology.

Disciplines

Landscape ecology

Landscape ecology has arisen from practical considerations of how ecological ideas could be applied in land management.