Previous chapters have addressed the traditional view of conservation biology as a subject, looking at the management of protected areas and the small populations they contain. Traditionally conservation action has been orientated towards single species and protected areas. The threat to individual species has formed the focus for action to protect their populations and habitats. However, there is increasing evidence that we should change the emphasis of action to the landscape. The scientific study of landscape-scale processes has been underdeveloped in the field of conservation until recently, but here the subjects of population ecology and landscape ecology meet face to face.

By reading this chapter students will gain an understanding of the importance of landscape-scale processes to the maintenance of biodiversity; how landscape ecology can inform conservation strategies and the ways in which species movement within the landscape may improve probability of survival and persistence.

‘Patchiness’ in the landscape

Look at any landscape and you can see that it consists of a mosaic of patches reflecting heterogeneity at a range of scales, from patches of moss on the surface of a stone to ecosystems on a continental scale. Biodiversity can also be measured on many different scales (see Chapter 1) and changes in biodiversity over space reflect to some extent the degree of patchiness and patch dynamics. We saw in Chapter 7 that there has been a paradigm shift in ecology and conservation from treating areas and their communities as stable homogeneous units to considering them as dynamic and patchy.