Landscape ecology development supported by geospatial technologies: A review

Numerous technologies have contributed to the recent development of landscape ecology, especially the geospatial technological advances constitute a revolution in landscape ecology. Extensive applications of geospatial technologies, such as fractal theory, geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) in landscape ecology research, suggest the necessity of such a review of research progress in this field. In this study, a brief introduction to fractal theory, GIS and RS and how they were applied in landscape ecology were provided first. Then, the current state-of-the-art was summarized and analyzed as reference for further promoting the development of landscape ecology science and its applications. Finally, opportunities and challenges of landscape ecology applications using these new technologies were discussed and concluded for future research. It was contended that a combination and integration of these technologies can substantially advance the study of landscape ecology for data acquisition, process modeling, scale transformation, result analysis and visualization. However, as no theoretical framework and application cases of applying an integration of fractal theory, GIS and RS techniques to landscape ecology research have been established, further studies are still much needed.