Overview

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. "Farina" 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.