ABSTRACT
The emerging fields of landscape ecology, conservation biology and ecological forestry provide key underpinnings for designing sustainable forest landscapes. In this chapter we introduce and summarise some key concepts and a practical method of analysing forest landscapes from an ecological point of view. This approach was pioneered by Dean Apostol and Nancy Diaz of the US Forest Service in the early 1990s and developed and applied more widely since then. The chapter presents the theoretical basis of this applied approach, then describes the analysis process before illustrating it with a case study. Subsequent chapters also describe aspects of the process either in the way it is integrated into the forest design process as a whole or as part of the case studies described, especially in Chapters 8 and 9.
