Journal
Landscape Ecology
Landscape Ecology, an open access publication, is the flagship journal of a well-established and rapidly developing interdisciplinary science that focuses explicitly on the ecological...
Ecosystems around the globe are facing increased demand for ecosystem services due to the fast-expanding human population. At the same time, they are challenged by the rapidly changing climate, extensive biological invasions, and dynamic changes of land use (e.g., deforestation and urbanization), threatening their long-term sustainability or even their sheer existence. A large number of studies have documented the impacts of global change on ecosystems worldwide, such as rapid losses of biodiversity, structural and compositional changes, and shifts of plant phenology, to name a few.
Given that ecosystems near or far are inherently coupled biologically (e.g., migration) and environmentally (e.g., biogeochemical cycling), changes in one ecosystem could have strong or weak effects on the others at various scales. More importantly, the aggregating effects resulting from within- and cross-scale interactions of these changes could lead to dramatic regime shifts in ecological patterns when certain thresholds/tipping points are crossed.
Understanding regime shifts in ecological patterns—from landscape to continental scales—is thus not only scientifically intriguing, but also crucial for our efforts to effectively manage ecosystems and to develop adaptive strategies. In this collection, we seek to understand the impacts of global changes (individually or collectively) on the shifts of existing ecological patterns or the emergence of novel ecological patterns in terrestrial and aquatic systems from landscape to global scales.
Contributions in this collection will cover the following three major topic areas:
1. Shifts of ecological patterns in terrestrial systems
2. Shifts of ecological patterns in aquatic systems
3. Impacts of global changes on ecosystem processes
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Mingzhen Lu
Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow and Omidyar Fellow at Santa Fe Institute, Dr. Lu is a member of Sigma Xi, Ecological Society of America, and the American Geophysical Union. His research interest is understanding how empirical regularities across the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems, especially their component biology and elements cycling, can be understood from the perspectives of cooperation, feedback, and geometry at the causal level. Dr. Lu hopes to improve our ability to project the future trajectories of terrestrial ecosystems and hopefully the entire Earth system with improved casual understanding. -
Lifei Wang
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough, Dr. Wang's main research interests include species distribution modeling, time series modeling, aquatic and fisheries ecology, aquatic invasive species ecology, and aquatic heavy metal pollution. -
Lixin Wang
Associate Professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), School of Science, Dr. Wang's general research interests are studying spatial and temporal patterns of water and nitrogen availability, how vegetation adapts to and affects such patterns, and how future climate/land use changes affect vegetation-resources interactions. -
Qinfeng Guo
Research Ecologist at USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Dr. Guo currently researches biological invasions (patterns, processes, and mechanisms of biotic invasions at the population and community levels); community ecology/biogeography; and biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. -
Songlin Fei
Professor and Dean's Chair of Remote Sensing at the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, Dr. Fei heads the Natural Resources Spatial Analysis Lab. The NRSA Lab focuses on the application of geospatial methods to address current ecological and environmental challenges. His academic interests are forest ecology, invasion ecology, and geospatial analysis.
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