3 - Landscape structure

Summary

Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.

(Joseph Conrad)

Having defined the landscape structure of riparian environments as the spatial pattern of the riparian zone within its region, including the major gradient from the source to the mouth of the river and its width, more detail is needed on how landscape structure can be operationalized or used to generate hypotheses about process. Forman and Godron (1986) considered several concepts that address the spatial configuration of landscape elements within the landscape. In reference to riparian landscapes, I will examine the concepts that pertain specifically to corridors, such as curvilinearity or sinuosity, whether the corridor is higher or lower than its surroundings, and connectivity, and others that apply to patches and the matrix, such as size, shape, and boundary characteristics, which are also important in the riparian context. One approach is to compare the landscape structure of different ecoregions.

Ecoregions

Bailey (1983, p. 365) defined ecoregions as ‘geographical zones that represent geographical groups or associations of similarly functioning ecosystems’. Bailey (1976) produced a map of ecoregions in the USA, which Teskey and Hinckley (1977a,b, 1978a,b,c) later used to classify riparian ecosystems. Bailey (1980) often noted the structure of the riparian vegetation in his description of individual ecoregion provinces in the USA.