Landscape Ecology in Action

In my office I am encased in bookshelves which hold an accumulation of literature on ecology that represents the papers and books over the last 50 years. My students enjoy rummaging through this collection be- cause it contains a record of the history of ecology and is full of sur- prises. Some of the most recent material pertains to landscape ecology, a subject that literally emerged fully active at the Veldhoven Interna- tional Congress organized by the landscape ecologists of The Nether- lands in 1981. The subject has developed quickly. It has one or more journals, which publish short works. It has a series of text books. And, it has just begun a series on monographs. One of the textbooks in land- scape ecology is titled Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology and was written by the Italian ecologist Almo Farina in 1998. My stu- dents like this text especially well because it is direct, to the point and comprehensive. "e;Farina"e; is on loan much of the time. In the present volume Almo Farina again addresses the subject of Landscape Ecology but from a different perspective than he took in his textbook. Landscape in Action focuses on the application of the princi- ples and concepts to problem solving. The two books make a pair, with the first technical and conceptual and the second applied to problems of land and water at large scale.