4 results
The Role of Landscape Ecology in Development*
- Zev Naveh
-
- Journal:
- Environmental Conservation / Volume 5 / Issue 1 / Spring 1978
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 24 August 2009, pp. 57-63
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Landscape ecology is concerned with the interrelations between the Total Human Ecosystem—integrating natural ecosystems and human techno-ecosystems —and its concrete, spatial landscape units. It deals not only with natural and semi-natural landscapes but also with cultural–rural and urban–industrial landscapes and their inputs of fossil energy, artefacts, and cultural information and control. As an emerging branch of human ecosystem science with an interdisciplinary outlook on modern land-uses, it could play an important role in developing countries. Here, one of its greatest challenges is to find a compromise between the needs for conservation or reconstitution of open landscapes and the socio-economic needs of society. This can be achieved by transforming the noneconomic richness of the local ecosystem into workable parameters for the land-use planners and decisionmakers.
As an example of such an attempt, the development and improvement of non-tillable Mediterranean uplands is presented by a model of multiple-use ecosystem management strategies and their benefits. Highest overall benefit for nature conservation, wildlife and recreation amenities, protection of environmental quality as well as livestock, forestry production, and water yields, can be expected by multiple-purpose reafforestation and revegetation.
For the assessment of compatibility of these different land-use factors and their mutual influences, a cybernetic sensitivity model is proposed and the most active and critical variables—foresty, livestock production, and recreation—and the most passive one— water yields—are determined.
In order to make possible cost-benefit analyses and achieve optimization for dynamic planning, these relative values should be replaced by actual quantitative ecological, economic, and socio-ecological, parameters —to be implemented on a national level as parts of comprehensive landscape master-plans.
33 - Toward a transdisciplinary landscape science
- from PART VII - Retrospect and prospect
-
- By Zev Naveh, Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Lowdermilk Division of Agricultural Engineering Technion Institute of Technology Israel
- Edited by John A. Wiens, The Nature Conservancy, Washington DC, Michael R. Moss, University of Guelph, Ontario
-
- Book:
- Issues and Perspectives in Landscape Ecology
- Published online:
- 20 November 2009
- Print publication:
- 14 April 2005, pp 346-354
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In the current period of transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial, information-rich age with its severe ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural crises, it has become very obvious that a critical point has been reached in the earth's capacity to support both nature and the growing consumption and expectations of its rapidly growing human population. For the first time in the history of the earth, one species – Homo sapiens – has acquired the power to eradicate most life in our natural and semi-natural landscapes, threatening not only their vital life-support functions but also human life itself. To divert the present evolutionary trajectory, which is leading toward breakdown, collapse, and extinction, to a breakthrough toward the sustainable future of nature and the highest attainable quality of human life, there is an urgent need for a far-reaching revolution of environmental and cultural sustainability (Laszlo, 2001). This is imperative in order to reverse global biological and cultural degradation and for dampening the dangerous effects of global warming and the elimination of the scourge of poverty. According to Brown (2001) this sustainability revolution will be driven by the widespread adoption of technological innovations in regenerative and recycling methods and in the efficient utilization of solar and other clean and renewable sources.
There are already many encouraging indicators that this is not an unrealistic Utopia. For example, the use of wind turbines and photovoltaic cells is growing now at over 25% annually, and will very soon be competitive with fossil fuels.
10 - Biodiversity and landscape management
-
- By Zev Naveh
- Edited by Ke Chung Kim, Pennsylvania State University, Robert D. Weaver, Pennsylvania State University
-
- Book:
- Biodiversity and Landscapes
- Published online:
- 04 August 2010
- Print publication:
- 26 August 1994, pp 187-208
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
In this book the problems of biodiversity and landscapes are rightly approached within a broad interdisciplinary context, transcending the realms of biology and natural science. One of the main objects of this chapter is to show that landscapes, as the total natural and human living space, can be fully comprehended only by such a transdisciplinary approach, and that their biological diversity is closely related to their cultural diversity.
In landscape ecology, as the scientific basis for landscape study, management, and conservation, biodiversity is considered an integral part of the broader concept of landscape heterogeneity. This has recently become a central issue in landscape ecology (Merriam, 1988) and a special symposium has been devoted to this subject in the United States (Turner, 1987).
First, some of the major premises of landscape ecology as related to biodiversity and landscape heterogeneity will be introduced and then the problems of conservation management of open landscapes will be dealt with. Although this discussion will be restricted chiefly to Europe and the Mediterranean, its implications are much more far reaching, especially for industrialized countries and regions with similar temperate and Mediterranean climates, and especially the eastern United States and California.
Holistic approaches to landscapes and landscape heterogeneity
In landscape ecology, the problems of the spatial, temporal, and functional landscape heterogeneity and its management are addressed on scales of a few meters to kilometers, and changes from the distant past to the present and predicted changes for the future are considered.
14 - Changes in the Mediterranean Vegetation of Israel in Response to Human Habitation and Land Use
-
- By Zev Naveh, Pua Kutiel
- Edited by George M. Woodwell, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts
-
- Book:
- The Earth in Transition
- Published online:
- 24 November 2009
- Print publication:
- 25 January 1991, pp 259-300
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Editor's Note: Ecologists normally think of evolution as independent of human influences. But people have been around for at least 2 million years, long enough to have influenced not only the landscape but evolution itself.
Naveh, a landscape ecologist, shows how long habitation of the Mediterranean Basin has affected both species and the structure of the communities of this region. The vegetation of the basin is both unique in having evolved over many thousands of years with dense human populations and, strangely, common to the point of illustrating the central principle of impoverishment.
The story is fascinating but not elevating: the human role has been persistent, unrelieved, continuous pressure toward impoverishment. The evolutionary response has been, not surprisingly, adaptation in the pattern now so familiar in these pages. Where we started on this path is obscure, buried in geological history hundreds of thousands of years back and interpretable in more recent times only from such fragmentary documents as the records of the rain of pollen left in special places such as bogs.
Naveh brings a lifetime of research and intimate knowlege of the region to bear on the history and development of the Mediterranean vegetation.