16 Regions and land mosaics
Like any large area, an urban region is tightly linked to surrounding regions
and to distant regions. These linkages often strongly affect spatial patterns and
processes within the region of interest (Forman2004a,Formanet al.2004). One
set of patterns might be calledboundary issuesbecause their origin is near the
urban-region boundary, either just inside or just outside. Boundary issues often
warrant careful watching, because they can rapidly affect the urban region, or
theadjoining region, and often change over time.
Inputs from an adjacent regionthat affect a major portion of an urban region
are typically of greatest concern. Examples include a major water supply from
an adjacent region’s aquifer, people entering for recreation or the city’s cultural
resources, and industrial air pollutants blown in.Outputs from a regiontoits
adjoining regions may be equally significant though lower profile. People and
goods enter and leave by car, truck, rail, sea, and air, so each of those routes
warrants evaluation. For example, holiday traffic is often channeled between the
metropolitan area and coastal or mountain areas.
Distant changes also affect regional inputs and outputs. A high-speed rail
line, new ski recreation areas, changes in immigration policy, and government
policy changes elsewhere may significantly affect a region. Across a continent
effects may involve migratory birds, livestock disease spread, changing crops,
Nature-based tourism, new markets, and international policy changes. In short,
land use in a region is tightly linked in both directions to other regions.Land-mosaic perspective and landscape ecology
Urban planning, city planning, regional planning, natural resource plan-
ning, and conservation planning are all reasonably well known fields with text-
books, journals, academic programs, professional societies, and leading scholars
and practitioners. All contribute extremely important knowledge and insight to
planning the future of a region. Theland-mosaic perspectivethat has emerged from
landscape ecology and related fields in the past two decades builds from these
and other foundations. It provides a body of theory and principles focusing on
thespatial arrangement of land uses for meshing and sustaining both natural
systems and people (Forman1995,2004a).
In essence,landscape ecologyfocuses on analyzing and understanding land
mosaics, large heterogeneous areas with important natural systems viewed at
thehuman scale, such as landscapes, regions, or the area seen from an airplane
window or in an aerial photograph (Hobbs1995,Dramstadet al.1996,Burel
and Baudry1999,Farina2005,Decamps and Decamps2001,Turneret al.2001,
Wuand Hobbs 2007, Ingegnoli2002,Anderson 2003, Decamps and Decamps
2004, Wiens and Moss2005,Turner 2005). Spatial arrangement is a core analytic