Where does landscape collide?

Sewall Wright's 1932 paper The roles of mutation, inbreeding, crossbreeding and selection in evolution pictured evolution as movement across a surface: each combination of genes is a point, its height is the reproductive success (fitness) that combination confers, and a population drifts and climbs toward peaks. De Visser and Krug's 2014 review Empirical fitness landscapes and the predictability of evolution gathered experiments that map real organisms onto such surfaces and ask how rugged they are. Here the landscape is an abstract mapping from gene combinations to fitness, a mathematical surface with no soil in it, not a stretch of real country, a painting, or the languages on a street.[1][2]

Unit

One point is a genotype; its height is the fitness that genotype yields

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Built by measuring fitness for many genotypes and plotting each against its position in gene space

Carl Troll's 1939 paper Luftbildplan und ökologische Bodenforschung coined landscape ecology and treated a landscape as a patchwork of interacting ecosystems whose spatial arrangement itself shapes ecological processes. Turner's 1989 review Landscape ecology: The effect of pattern on process set out how that patchwork, its patches, edges, and corridors, governs the movement of organisms, energy, and materials across it. Here the landscape is a real, physical mosaic of land on the ground, measured in hectares and metres, not an abstract fitness surface, a painted view, or a set of public signs.[3][4]

Unit

One landscape is a bounded mosaic of patches of different cover, sized in hectares

Recovery means

A disturbed patch can be recolonised from neighbouring patches, and connectivity across the mosaic governs how fast

Measured by

Quantified from maps and aerial or satellite imagery using metrics of patch size, shape, and connectivity

Kenneth Clark's 1949 book Landscape into art traced how the depiction of natural scenery became a subject in its own right in European painting, and how landscape came to name both that genre and the idea of scenery viewed as a scene. The word had entered English around 1600 from the Dutch painters' term landschap, first as a name for such pictures and only later for actual countryside. Here the landscape is a represented view, a picture or the scenery it shows, judged by composition and by what it makes of a place, not a fitness surface, an ecological mosaic, or the languages on public signs.[5]

Unit

One instance is a single depicted view: a painting, drawing, or photograph of scenery

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied by describing composition, viewpoint, and the conventions a work uses to organise a view

Landry and Bourhis's 1997 study Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality defined the linguistic landscape as the languages visible on public and commercial signs, billboards, and place names in a given territory, and argued that this visible mix signals the standing of each language group. Later work reads such signage to study which languages a public space makes present and which it leaves out. Here the landscape is the sum of written language on display in a place, counted sign by sign, not a fitness surface, a mosaic of ecosystems, or a painted view.[6]

Unit

One instance is the set of visible language signs in a defined territory, counted per sign

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Coded by photographing and tallying signs by the language or languages each displays across a survey area

In transition studies, landscape refers to the sociotechnical landscape, slow-changing outside factors such as demography and politics that press on regimes, in the multi-level perspective. This meaning comes from Geels (2002) in Research Policy.[7]

Unit

Recovery means

Measured by