Restoration Forestry Research
Structure and Function of Regional Landscapes

Objectives

Identify how landscape patterns at the regional scale are related to land ownership and corresponding management practices versus natural ecological regions controlled by soils and mesoclimate. Determine how these patterns affect regional biodiversity and spatial ecosystem interactions. Predict how potential future management will change observed patterns and their effects.

Background

In recent years, concern has grown over the impact of traditional forest management practices on biodiversity and ecosystem sustainability. At the same time, the field of landscape ecology has become more influential. This conceptual growth in landscape ecology has been accompanied by new, more easily used computerized geographic information systems (GIS). GIS have obvious application to the management of complex, spatially distributed resources such as forests and wildlife. One application of these methods is in analysis of the spatial structure of forest landscapes. This involves quantitatively analyzing forest-patch size, shape, distribution, number, and spatial associations.

The pattern of forest landscapes is not random, but is characteristic of ecosystem responses to disturbance events imposed on a landform pattern within a climatic region. As a result, natural primary forest landscapes have different spatial patterns than human-disturbed or managed landscapes.

This project is a cooperative effort between the University of Wisconsin Department of Forestry, the USDA-Forest Service, the Natural Resources Research Institute, and the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Analyzing landscape patterns can be useful in assessing the relative effects of management scenarios and in setting objectives for restoring spatial patterns hypothesized to be important in sustainable functioning of ecosystems.

For more information on this topic please contact:
Gerald Bartelt (608)221-6344