Abstract
Landscape ecology is now a mature discipline, and I have been privileged to watch it grow and flourish in the United States during my professional career. It is hard for me to believe that more than 25 years have passed since the first United States Landscape Ecology Symposium was convened in January 1986 at the Institute of Ecology, University of Georgia (UGA). At that time, Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviet Union was intact, incidents including Chernobyl and Challenger were in the news, and world population was a mere 4.8 billion people. Landscape ecology concepts were only emerging, and the technology was nascent. There were relatively few landscape ecology publications and no commercial geographic information systems or digital spatial pattern analysis programs were available. Yellowstone National Park had not yet burned, the oil tanker, Exxon Valdez, had not yet spilled its oil, and most ecologists had heard little about the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina). Time has indeed marched on, and those earlier days when landscape ecology was little known and not widely accepted seem distant.
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Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to my PhD advisor, Dr. Frank B. Golley, for having provided such tremendous guidance, encouragement, and support to me as a young scientist, for co-organizing that first United States Landscape Ecology Symposium with me, and for his numerous contributions to the field of landscape ecology. I am also grateful to all who served on the USIALE executive committee during my tenure as chair between 1994 and 1996: Mike Demers (secretary, 1994–1996), Louis Iverson (treasurer, 1993–1995), Sandra Turner (treasurer, 1995–1997), Eric Gustafson (councilor, 1993–1995), Dave Mladenoff (councilor, 1993–1995), Kathy Freemark (councilor, 1994–1996), Marie-José Fortin (councilor, 1995–1997), Joe Means (councilor, 1995–1997), Jeff Klopatek (program chair, 1994–1996), Joan Nassauer (local host 1995, Minneapolis), and Bob Coulson and Robert Giordano (local hosts 1996, Galveston).
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Turner, M. (2015). Twenty-Five Years of United States Landscape Ecology: Looking Back and Forging Ahead. In: Barrett, G., Barrett, T., Wu, J. (eds) History of Landscape Ecology in the United States. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2275-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2275-8_4
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