Managing and Designing Landscapes for Conservation || Emergent Properties of Land Mosaics: Implications for Land Management and Biodiversity Conservation

✍ Scribed by Lindenmayer, David B.; Hobbs, Richard J.

• Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 114 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 1405159146
• DOI: 10.1002/9780470692400.ch18

✦ Synopsis

Over recent decades, an increased commitment to linking research with practice has resulted in many new insights for biodiversity conservation in human-dominated landscapes. However, despite concentrated research effort on 'fragmented ecosystems' , there is often a mismatch between this work and the knowledge requirements of land managers. Most studies have been carried out at the site or patch level, but management questions often relate to the properties of whole mosaics. These include the total amount of habitat needed for effective conservation of a taxon, the relative value of different spatial configurations, and the optimal landscape composition. To appreciate these 'emergent' properties of land mosaics, researchers must consider the mosaic as a single entity. We discuss ways in which the emergent properties of mosaics influence biodiversity conservation, and advance seven principles for landscape-level management of biodiversity. There are many opportunities to investigate further the properties of mosaics. Key challenges include the need to investigate responses to mosaic structure for a wider range of taxa, to untangle the independent effects of different mosaic properties, to examine the influence of the spatial scale of the mosaic on responses shown by biota and to identify the form of species' responses to mosaic properties (especially non-linear responses). In most parts of the world, the future for biodiversity conservation depends on the persistence of species in human-dominated landscapes, highlighting the urgency for better understanding of how the emergent properties of mosaics influence biotic patterns and processes.