ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the physiology of the human olfactory system and focuses on how humans can extract spatial information from smells. It highlights different approaches that use humans as sensors for studying smellscape patterns. Land appropriation not only transforms the physiognomic landscape but also affects sound- and smellscape patterns over time and space. Scape ecology aims at describing the environment as a combination of colors, sounds, and smells of various qualities and intensities. While landscape ecologists are trained to delineate the environment using physiognomic patterns, sound- and smellscape ecologists have learned to describe the same environment on the basis of acoustic and olfactory patterns, respectively. Across the 45 sampling points, the Procrustes correlation between the two team members was 0.80, 0.74, and 0.73 for land-, sound-, and smellscape descriptors, respectively. Ecologists have a long tradition of studying the empirical relationship between the physiognomic patterns of a landscape and some response variables of ecological interest.
