Landscape ecology differs from most other ecological theories we’ve read in class in the way it approaches seeing a region. Where Clements would see a climax, or succession toward a climax, or Gleason would see millions of individual organisms vying for space to spread their seeds and germinate, or where Paine, Connell, or MacArthur or others may be studying a single species or a narrow portion of an ecosystem, Turner is taking a wider view. When I imagine the map of a region a landscape ecologist would use, I imagine many overhead transparencies that were used in school when I was younger; one would have the type of vegetation growing in a region drawn on it, another would be a topographical map, another shows drainage, another soil nutrient content, and so on. Layering these transparencies atop one another, one would begin to see patterns emerge where certain types of vegetation always grew near a stream but only in regions where another type of vegetation grew upstream, or perhaps the probability of a hectacre of land succeeding from one phase to the next in a given number of years is increased in proximity to a certain type of soil nutrient.

One of the points I appreciated about the essay is that, while it didn’t address the topic directly, I saw it as something of an answer to Gleason’s issue with the definition of a plant association. I see landscape ecology, when employed on a mass scale, as able to show the overarching trends in vegetational growth that would satisfy Clements’ and other’s definition of an association, while also having the nuance to address smaller regions that were anomalous to the general trend.

A few of the issues I found with this theory were that the more data one collected, the more variables were involved. In order to account for those variables more data still would need to be collected and so on and so on. In addition, there is an issue of scale. Turner writes on page 175, “Landscape complexity has not been shown to be constant across a wide range of a spatial scales… Applying predictions made at one scale to other scales may be difficult if landscape structure varies with scale.” On page 180 she also says, “Elucidating the relationship between landscape pattern and ecological processes is a primary goal of ecological research on landscapes… achieving this goal may require the extrapolation of results obtained from small-scale experiments to broad scales.” The issue here is that at each scale the variables involved will fluctuate. The scales aren’t just small or broad scale either; every scale, while similar will have slightly different considerations. What this leaves one with are more unknown unknowns the more one extrapolates from data extracted from a different scale. However, this is unavoidable because a thorough survey of all variables at every scale in every region of the earth is impossible, a point the author also addresses.

Once I began to understand the process of landscape ecology the utility quickly became clear. Being able to predict the behavior of a plot of land based on how it can be expected to interact with surrounding plots of lands could be extremely useful and paint a more accurate image of the future. The author points out that this form of fortune telling could and should be used by conservationists in planning preserves among other uses. I largely agree with the theory and the author’s closing statement that through experimentation and testing of the theory it could develop to an even more powerful tool.