Landscape frontiers, geography frontiers: Lessons to be learned

G P Malanson; Y Zeng; Stephen J Walsh

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9272.2006.00576.x

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Landscape frontiers, geography frontiers: Lessons to be learned

Journal article

Peer reviewed

Landscape frontiers, geography frontiers: Lessons to be learned

G P Malanson, Y Zeng and Stephen J Walsh

Professional Geographer, Vol.58(4), pp.383-396

2006

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9272.2006.00576.x

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Abstract

Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience

Human Geography

complexity

ecotone

GIScience

self-organization

Advancing ecotones, such as treelines and frontiers of human settlement, may share some characteristic dynamics because both include feedbacks between spatial pattern and process. Both might be examined as complex, self-organizing systems in terms of complexity theory and thus be usefully compared. A cellular automaton of advancing alpine treeline in Montana shows attractors in power-law frequency distributions of spatial and temporal pattern. Frontiers of study areas in the Amazonian region of Ecuador, analyzed using change detection of Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery, have power-law distributions of advancing deforestation. Alternative approaches in self-organized complexity, including self-organized percolation, and the inverse cascade model, and an approach to complexity involving optimization, highly optimized tolerance, are considered. Some combination of these, based on their common ancestry in percolation theory (with its ties to geocomputation), might provide insights into population-environment interactions at settlement frontiers and ecotones together, given comparisons drawn between the spatial feedbacks at alpine treeline and in Ecuador. GIScience and landscape ecology can develop synergies by building on this area of geocomputation and complexity theory, as in analysis of attractors in state spaces of spatial metrics from spatially explicit simulations and representing their uncertainty.

Details

Title: Landscape frontiers, geography frontiers: Lessons to be learned
Authors: G P Malanson (Author) - University of Iowa, United States
Y Zeng (Author) - University of Iowa, United States
Stephen J Walsh (Author) - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States
Publication details: Professional Geographer, Vol.58(4), pp.383-396
Publisher: Routledge
Date published: 2006
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9272.2006.00576.x
ISSN: 0033-0124
Organisation Unit: University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Language: English
Record Identifier: 99449945602621
Output Type: Journal article

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