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Native pollinators provide an important ecosystem service for many pollination-dependent fruit crops, but require nesting and foraging resources in proximity to target crop plants. Landscape context and fluctuation in floral resources may influence the distribution of pollination services. This study investigates how landscape context influences bumble bee density on cranberry marshes across a resource pulse created by the target crop bloom. We sampled bumble bees at fourteen cranberry marshes before, during, and after the cranberry bloom in central Wisconsin. We quantified floral richness and surrounding land cover and assessed their effects on bumble bee density and colony representation using OLS regression. We measured colony representation as a colony detection rate—where low colony detection means more colonies were represented by single individual foragers. The amount of forest surrounding marshes explained the most variation in colony density, but not colony representation on site. Sites with high meadow interspersion in the surrounding landscape had lower colony representation (i.e., detection rate), suggesting some dilution effect. Colony density and detection did not change between the pre- and post-bloom period and resource pulse, even after statistically controlling for important landscape-scale effects. Yet, relative increase in colony density, was best explained by increased floral richness and decreased open-shrub bog. Landscapes with less clumpy forest experienced increased colony representation during the crop bloom. We suggest maintaining forest within cultivated landscapes to promote local bumble bee colony density, and increasing floral richness on site to attract foraging bees.

Despite synergistic goals across a wide breadth of fields and modalities, coastal landscape conservation projects that engage the lay public and integrate narratives of place remain elusive. This paper addresses these needs by introducing and evaluating the Wisconsin Geotools, an integrated pair of mobile-and web-based applications that allow users to generate and share spatially defined multimedia observations — including photos, short textual descriptions (or journals), and audio and video clips — of their surrounding bioregional landscapes. We followed a participatory, user-centered design process to develop a mobile application that uses GPS capabilities to geolocate multimedia observations of landscapes and feed them into a web-based application, which displays content through the structure of an interactive story map. The applications were piloted with coastal community user groups in Green Bay (Lake Michigan), Wisconsin, USA. Over 800 observations were recorded by participants in our study area. Results from a user evaluation survey indicate the geotools effectively engaged participants in learning about and exploring their surrounding coastal landscapes. A spatial analysis revealed participants’ affinity for water-related features in landscapes. We close by suggesting a variety of ways in which these tools can support future projects and existing methodologies that are advancing transdisciplinary approaches to engaging the public in coastal conservation.

Stressor gradients and spatial narratives of the St. Louis River Estuary, a joint Minnesota and Wisconsin Sea Grant study, connected aquatic science research with spatially-explicit stories of local resource issues and place-based geo-quests to enhance spatial awareness and stewardship of the estuary. The goal of this paper is to report and reflect on an integrated study that combined environmental humanities and technology with aquatic science in a spatial context. Our study was organized into three objectives around research, outreach, and evaluation. First, we summarized anthropogenic stressors within high resolution watersheds and linked the watershed stress estimates to aquatic habitats within the estuary. Second, we designed tools to deliver place-based environmental science and technology to targeted users to increase awareness, learning, and the potential for long-term stewardship. And third, we evaluated the responses of targeted end users to their interaction with the project’s integrated science and innovative delivery methods. Finally, central to all three objectives, we created a dynamic website to facilitate regional to national coastal outreach and education goals. We found significant correlations between the stressor index and the water quality and biotic data, along with variability attributed to landscape elements. Connecting this science with the place-based experiences we collected is expected to expand the scope and reach of state, bi-national and non-governmental outreach programs. The project also has direct applications to classroom science education. Developing this integrated project contributed to our shared knowledge of environmental and cultural aspects of the estuary for place-based education, and offers several lessons for future work of this nature.

The concept of ecosystem services (ES) has become widely used because it bridges ecology and economics and links nature to society. ES may evolve over time in dynamic landscapes driven by myriad processes. However, the consequences of changes in key ES has not been considered adequately in current ES research. Here we propose a framework for linking ES with landscape history, which can help us better understand the evolution of ES over time. We illustrate the framework by a case study from Switzerland. Both the capacity of landscapes to supply ES and the realization and recognition of key ES are likely to change over time. This insight should have important implications for landscape sustainability and related scenario studies.

Community food production in the form of home gardening, community gardening, school gar- dening, and urban farming continues to increase in popularity in many parts of the world. This interest has led to public and private investment in community food production and increased need for urban agricul- tural planning as a way to manage growth and prioritize resource allocation. Municipal planning and thoughtful institutional support for the practice will require program evaluation and greater attention to the spatial composition and configuration of this widely dispersed practice. This article explores the results of community-supported landscape socio-eco- logical research in Madison, WI (USA) to assess the spatial and social dynamics of community food production. Results indicate that community food production resources are unevenly distributed across the study area. Historic community garden placement does appear to be consistent with community priori- tization which dictates placing resources in areas with low median household income. However, home garden presence and recent community garden place- ment both occur in areas of higher than average median household income. Specific focus is placed on how an understanding of landscape placement and pattern has helped inform attempts to meet municipal and regional objectives in addressing urban food insecurity.

Aldo Leo­pold is well known in North America as a conservationist, author, and promoter of the Land Ethic. Although Leo­pold’s work is rarely included in the realm of landscape ecology, he left several illustrations of an early spatial theory for conservation. While European geographer Troll published the term ‘landscape ecology’ in 1939, Leo­pold was discovering the role of spatial configuration in European working landscapes, and began to apply the landscape ecology concepts to wildlife management and cooperative conservation in the US. With his own spatial language he wrote, mapped, and applied elements of pattern, process, and connectedness in the landscape. In this perspective piece I use three examples from Leo­pold’s work to demonstrate his contribution to spatial theory in early conservation design. First, this paper deciphers spatial elements conveyed through Leo­pold’s writing, drawing, and teaching in the early 1930s. Second, I re-interpret Leo­pold’s observations of the spatial design of remises from his visit to Silesia, Europe. Third, I show how the lessons from Silesia were applied to a landscape in Wisconsin, USA, involving both farmers and townspeople in cooperative implementation of a remise system. Collectively, a new perspective emerges on the early dialogue of landscape ecology and conservation across continents.

Ecological relationships beneath a forest canopy are related spatially to the pattern of canopy gaps and sunlight penetration. Methods to characterize and predict canopy light patterns from easily gathered site inventory data are not readily available. We developed a model to estimate the proportion and distribution of canopy openings visible from the under-story, in lieu of hemispherical photography or field instrumentation. An automated procedure for constructing vertical wide-angle views of forest canopies using standard computer-aided design (CAD) software was applied to canopy structure data collected on individual mapped trees in old-growth plots. Vertical hemispherical photos of actual canopies were paired with constructed CAD views of the same point to evaluate the correspondence between the two. Using image analysis software, we assessed total canopy openness (CO) and largest gap size (GAP) on 324 image pairs from seven different plots. With the exception of one plot, a single quadratic model form fit the remaining observations, resulting in r2 values over 50% between CAD and photo images. We could not adequately model a plot with heavy non-tree understory vegetation. We also compared contour maps of CO gradients from the CAD images and estimates from the regression model to the photographic images to evaluate whether spatial distributions of canopy openings were correctly captured by the constructed model approach. Visual observations of the gradient map show peaks and valleys in canopy openness that visually match openness on photos at corresponding locations in the plot. Lastly, we found a relatively stable correspondence in the distribution of gap sizes between photographic and CAD images. The models presented here may be applied to known or simulated patterns of tree data to derive a spatially-explicit estimation of gap patterns without the need for corresponding photography or instrumentation.

The distribution of human occupation across a landscape provides informationabout how people use the landscape, about patterns of economic development,and about social interactions of human groups. When the distributions areexamined over several thousand years, we gain an evolutionary understanding,not only of the people and their cultural patterns, but also of physicallandscape development. The focus of this assessment was to examine andcompare settlement patterns of prehistoric, historic, and present timeperiods, based on known cultural sites in the Eastern Upper Peninsula ofMichigan, U.S.A., and to generate hypotheses about the interaction ofsettlement pattern and landscape change at multiple scales. Patterns ofsettlement among the three time periods were compared at three geographicscales: by subregional ecosystems, by landscape ecosystems and by terraincharacteristics. The Michigan Bureau of History database of archaeologicalsites was searched for prehistoric habitation sites of Middle or LateWoodland period (ca. 3000-300 years before present). Historic occupationswere drawn from pre-European settlement landscape data based on General LandOffice survey notes of the 1850s. We extracted “urban” categories from landcover classified from Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery to measure presentoccupations. Spatial patterns and dynamics of settlement areas in each timeperiod were examined using the ARC/INFO geographic information system (GIS).Results showed a tendency for settlement in all time periods on the bedrockand lowland landscape groups near Great Lakes shorelines, generally occupyingslopes less than two percent. The distribution of present occupations, interms of both slope aspect and geographic subregion (multi-scalar), wassimilar to the distribution of prehistoric occupations. Both prehistoric andpresent sites were primarily south facing and were frequently found alongGreen Bay and Lake Michigan shorelines.