April 30, 2009

Joan Iverson Nassauer, a professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, has received a second consecutive award for published research from the U.S. International Association for Landscape Ecology (US-IALE).

Nassauer has received honorable mentions for "Outstanding Paper in Landscape Ecology" the past two years. The latest award was given earlier this month for a paper in the September 2008 issue of Landscape Ecology, the journal of IALE. Last year, Nassauer and co-authors received an honorable mention for a paper in the December 2007 issue of the same journal.

Nassauer co-authored her 2008 paper with animal ecologist Paul Opdam, a professor of Landscape Ecology in the Department of Land Use Planning at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He is also affiliated with Wageningen's ALTERRA Landscape Center.

According to US-IALE, landscape ecology is the study of spatial variation in landscapes at a variety of scales. It includes the biophysical and societal causes and consequences of landscape heterogeneity. Above all, it is broadly interdisciplinary. The conceptual and theoretical core of landscape ecology links natural sciences with related human disciplines.

In their paper titled "Design in science: Extending the landscape ecology paradigm," she and Opdam argue that design is a common ground for transferring science knowledge into the societal domain to affect landscape change. They also argue that design is a generator of science hypotheses about the societal and environmental causes and effects of landscape patterns.

"In the paper, we define design as any intentional change of landscape pattern for the purpose of sustainably providing ecosystem services while recognizably meeting societal needs and respecting societal values," Nassauer said. "We point out that both the activity of designing and the resulting design pattern, can be part of science. Based on principles of knowledge innovation, we develop an analytic framework for incorporating design in science.í‚  Then we apply this framework to show how it's been done."

Nominators said the paper deserved recognition because it demonstrated the ability to link European and American schools of thought and strove to develop a process that created a seamless connection between ecological science and landscape planning.

Her previous award was for a paper titled, "The shared landscape: what does aesthetics have to do with ecology?" It was nominated and selected as an outstanding paper in landscape ecology because it clarified a key dimension of the relationship between natural and human systems: landscape aesthetics.

Co-authors were Paul Gobster, a natural resources social scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service; Terry Daniel, an environmental psychologist at the University of Arizona; and Gary Fry, an ecologist with the Department of Landscape Architecture & Spatial Planning with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.