Today, there is a growing demand for designed landscapes'from public parks to backyards'to be not only beautiful and functional, but also sustainable. Sustainability means more than just saving energy and resources. It requires integrating the landscapes we design with ecological systems. With Principles of Ecological Landscape Design, Travis Beck gives professionals and students the first book to translate the science of ecology into design practice.
This groundbreaking work explains key ecological concepts and their application to the design and management of sustainable landscapes. It covers biogeography and plant selection, assembling plant communities, competition and coexistence, designing ecosystems, materials cycling and soil ecology, plant-animal interactions, biodiversity and stability, disturbance and succession, landscape ecology, and global change. Beck draws on real world cases where professionals have put ecological principles to use in the built landscape.
The demand for this information is rising as professional associations like the American Society of Landscape Architects adopt new sustainability guidelines (SITES). But the need goes beyond certifications and rules. For constructed landscapes to perform as we need them to, we must get their underlying ecology right. Principles of Ecological Landscape Design provides the tools to do just that.
Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction
Chapter 1. Right Plant, Right Place: Biogeography and Plant Selection Chapter 2. Beyond Massing: Working with Plant Populations and Communities Chapter 3. The Struggle for Coexistence: On Competition and Assembling Tight Communities Chapter 4. Complex Creations: Designing and Managing Ecosystems Chapter 5. Maintaining the World as We Know It: Biodiversity for High-functioning Landscapes Chapter 6. The Stuff of Life: Promoting Living Soils and Healthy Waters Chapter 7. The Birds and the Bees: Integrating Other Organisms Chapter 8. When Lightning Strikes: Counting on Disturbance, Planning for Succession Chapter 9. An Ever-shifting Mosaic: Landscape Ecology Applied Chapter 10. No Time Like the Present: Creating Landscapes for an Era of Global Change
Bibliography Index
"This well-timed book is a practical and easy-to-use reference that deftly negotiates the cleft between overview and discrete applications. By understanding the ecological principles presented in the book and adding individual ingenuity and creative license, designers and engineers of the landscape can more effectively improve the productive capacity of the constructed landscape for ecological integrity and the human experience."
