Modeling ecological influences across landscape space

• William A. Reiners

Abstract
The general objective of this sabbatical proposal is to promote our understanding of how an event or condition on one part of a landscape can lead to ecological effects somewhere else on that landscape. The proposed research will culminate a program that has been supported by an Andrew W. Mellon grant since 1995. Research outlined in this sabbatical proposal will implement the completion of this larger program by:

1) completing formation of a relational database of literature in which ecological processes and influences are modeled in realistic landscape space (to be made available as an ACCESS file on the NCEAS or my own web site;

2) publishing a conceptual, broadly disseminated paper demonstrating the utility of process-based landscape models for addressing the general problem of how ecological influences are propagated across realistic space; and

3) publishing a book linking the concepts of propagation of ecological influences across landscapes to distributed modeling approaches with illustrated text and exemplary programs in an enclosed CD.