Forest Landscapes and Global Change : Challenges for Research and Management

Climate change, urban sprawl, abandonment of agriculture, intensification of forestry and agriculture, changes in energy generation and use, expansion of infrastructure networks, habitat destruction and degradation, and other drivers of change occur at increasing rates. They affect patterns and processes in forest landscapes, and modify ecosystem services derived from those ecosystems. Consequently, rapidly changing landscapes present many new challenges to scientists and managers. While it is not uncommon to encounter the terms “global change” and “landscape” together in the ecological literature, a global analyses of drivers of change in forest landscapes, and their ecological consequences have not been addressed adequately. That is the goal of this volume: an exploration of the state of knowledge of global changes in forested landscapes with emphasis on causes and effects, and challenges faced by researchers and land managers. Initial chapters identify and describe major agents of landscape change: climate, fire, and human activities. The next series of chapters address implications of changes on ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation and carbon flux. A chapter that describes methodologies of detecting and monitoring landscape changes is presented followed by chapter that highlights the many challenges forest landscape managers face amidst of global change. Finally, we present a summary and a synthesis of the main points presented in the book. Each chapter will contain the individual research experiences of chapter authors, augmented by review and synthesis of global scientific literature on relevant topics, as well as critical input from multiple peer reviewers.

João C. Azevedo is a Professor at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources at the School of Agriculture of Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, Portugal, and Vice-coordinator and researcher at CIMO Mountain Research Centre. He is also the President of APEP (IALE Portugal) and the Regional representative of the IUFRO Landscape Ecology Working Party (IUFRO8.01.02) for the Mediterranean region. As a researcher his interests have been related mainly with forestry and landscape ecology, particularly the study of the effects of land change, through either abandonment or management, in biological and physical landscape processes. He is currently involved in national and international projects dealing with the interactions of landscape change and the provision of ecosystem services.

Ajith H. Perera is a senior research scientist and leads the Forest Landscape Ecology Program at the Ontario Forest Research Institute, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Canada. He has over 25 years of research experience in landscape ecology, much of it focused on understanding patterns and processes of boreal forest fire regimes. He has produced over 100 scientific publications, including the books Ecology of a Managed Terrestrial Landscape: Patterns and Processes of Forest Landscapes in Ontario (2000), Emulating Natural Forest Landscape Disturbances: Concepts and Applications (2004), Forest Landscape Ecology: Transferring Knowledge to Practice (2006), Expert Knowledge and Its Application in Landscape Ecology (2010), Ecology of Wildfire Residuals in Boreal Forests (in press). Currently he is editing two volumes: Modeling Forest Landscape Disturbances and Mapping Forest Landscape Patterns.

Maria Alice Pinto is a Professor at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, School of Agriculture, Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, Portugal, and a researcher at CIMO Mountain Research Centre. Her research has focused on theevolutionarily processes underlying patterns of genetic diversity using the honey bee as the model system. Currently she is using the tools of landscape genomics to unravel the complex patterns and processes of Iberian honey bee evolution. She is an author on over 20 peer-reviewed papers and 4 book chapters and the editor of 2 books. Maria Pinto earned a PhD degree in Entomology from Texas A&M University, USA, in 2003.