LULC: Land Use, Land Cover studies and it’s growing importance

Almost every accessible piece of land today is being utilized for some or the other purpose directly affecting human needs. Not only is the land being used intensively, but is also evolving and changing with time. What was agricultural land 10 years ago, is most likely to be urban land today. What was forest land […]

Botanical support: How can plants help control landslides?

Landslides, when occur, account for huge destruction to both life and property. What landslides are and what are the measures one could take to prevent them has been already mentioned here. When it comes to prevention of landslides, a neat relationship between landslide and botany is seen. One of the measures is to grow trees up […]

The connection between living and non-living: A look at dams in floodplains

Every ecosystem, at the end of the day, is governed by the environmental factors that exist there. This, I’ve mentioned time and again. How intricate is this relationship? Take a look! One single dam can alter the geomorphic (or landscape or environmental) factors of the entire floodplain. These changes are immediately seen in the ecology […]

Positive feedback loops: Controlling global climate

(This is the fifth post in the “feedback loops” series.) Climate is weather, over a long period of time. Unlike weather, climate is predictable. It has a number of factors like solar insolation, rainfall, temperature and latitude/altitude that controls it in a particular place. Also, climate encompasses a large area. Because of the spatial and […]

Positive feedback loops: Creating more of what’s already there!

(This is the third post in the “feedback loops” series) Ever used a bad eraser in your life? One that has been used so much that it’s become completely black? What happens when you erase something with that eraser? Instead of cleanly removing everything you have written on the page, it just makes your page […]

Ecotones and edges: Explaining abrupt changes in ecosystems

Have you ever wondered why floodplains host such a variety of life? Why fishes tend to congregate in estuaries for spawning? Why humans have thrived for so long along floodplains? In nature ecosystems transition from one to another gradually as well as abruptly. I have gone into detail about the gradual transition of ecosystems in Across a gradient: […]

Feedback loops: Regulating natural processes

When it gets really cold, what happens to your body? First you start shivering. Then, if you don’t take the hint and get warm, some of your body parts become numb. Keep this up, and soon, it’ll become blue. So will your mood. Similarly, what happens when it gets really hot? You sweat. You sweat […]

Across a gradient: How changing environment dictates community composition

Landscape ecology has evolved specifically because of certain phenomena that are unique to the big scale. One such phenomenon is the variation of vegetation along a gradient. This gradation is central to the vegetation continuum concept, which seeks to explain that presence or absence of a species in an area has as much to do […]

Floodplains: All you need to know

Floodplains are a fascinating piece of landscape. Problem is, we never talk about it. Rivers tend to hog all the limelight. When it comes to economic needs, the river is studied more closely; what fishes can we derive, what is the discharge of the river, whether a dam can be built across it, what is […]

Diversity at different scales

Scale is absolutely critical in ecological studies. Everything, and I mean everything, depends on the scale at which it is defined. The is true for species diversity as well. Diversity of species (sometimes communities) in a landscape is generally observed in three different scales.