What is holistic landscape ecology? A conceptual introduction

To meet the challenges of the emerging information-rich society, landscape ecology must become a holistic problem-solving oriented science by joining the transdisciplinary scientific revolution with a paradigm shift from conventional reductionistic and mechanistic approaches to holistic and organismic approaches of wholeness, connectedness and ordered complexity. Its central holistic concept is the Total Human Ecosystem as the highest level of co-evolutionary complexity in the global ecological hierarchy, with solar energy powered biosphere and fossil energy powered technosphere landscapes as its concrete systems. Landscape ecology could contribute to their structural and functional integration into a coherent sustainable ecosphere and thereby to the establishment of a sustainable balance between attractive and productive biosphere landscapes and healthy and livable technosphere landscapes for this and future generation. By utilizing new insights in self-organization of autopioetic systems and their cross-catalytic networks in the Total Human Ecosystem for synergistic benefits of the people, their economy and landscapes, such holistic landscape ecology together with other mission-driven transdisciplinary environmental sciences could serve as a catalyst for the urgently needed post-industrial symbiosis between nature and human society. This would ensure also their further biological and cultural evolution. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.