Second, the sustainability of the metropolitan landscape is contingent on how designers, planners, engineers, scientists, lawmakers, and citizens address the "wicked problems" of sprawl, habitat loss, and placelessness. Landscape architects, architects, and planners need to be cognizant that when they make claims about the environmental and social benefits of their designs and plans to urban ecosystems, more and more people will ask them : to back up their ideas with evidence. Good science based on measurable outcomes is needed to back up such claims. The challenge is finding the research most relevant to design and planning, among the blizzard of peer-reviewed articles being published. Ecologists are starting to produce good and useful research about metropolitan landscapes, but not enough of it is synthesized to a level where it is user-friendly for designers and planners.

  Third, the synthesis of ecological knowledge at the intersection of ecology, design, and planning will become an increasingly important area of interest. New research approaches and methods are needed to take on this challenge. The translators of ecological knowledge need to be well-versed in the science, design, and planning of metropolitan landscapes, an idea that applies equally to scientists, designers, and planners. Inadequate foundations in any of these disciplines will jeopardize the effective transferability of ideas.

Fourth, translational models of research and teaching that link sustainability science to sustainable design need to be more widely adopted and accepted. Unless institutions, governmental agencies, and municipalities agree to fund this type of research and education, however, it is unlikely to take place at the necessary scale and breadth to make the greatest impact. Universities also need to respond with new transdisciplinary types of curricula that allow for better cross training between disciplines, and enhance knowledge synthesis between sustainability science and sustainable design. This step will help foster more creative solutions for metropolitan sustainability that are not only grounded in good science and artistic expression, but also inspire people to be more ethical toward the environment and other species that share it with us.

A final note: we are interested in hearing your feedback. Readers are strongly encouraged to contact the guest editor at musac003@umn.edu or at 612-626-0810 to share ideas and experiences about the design, planning, and ecology of metropolitan landscapes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The 2006 symposium Myths and Realities of Ecology , Design, Biopersity, and Ecosystem Health in the Metropolitan Landscape symposium was generously supported with funds from the H.W S.

Cleveland Fund of the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Minnesota. Special thanks go to John Koepke, department head of Landscape Architecture, for his strong support of the symposium concept and special issue from day one. The following people at the College of Design helped to make the symposium a successful and memorable event: Krista Bergen, Tom Fisher, Ann Forsyth, Chelsa Johnson, Joanne Richardson, Marcia Tenney Rachel Ward, James Watchske, and many others. Finally co-editors Elen Deming and James Palmer provided enthusiastic support and editorial guidance during the development of this special issue.

NOTES

The scientific merits and conservation benefits of corridors for biopersity have been hotly debated in both conservation biology and landscape ecology (see Hilty et al. 2004). The debate is too complex to review in this essay, but despite their drawbacks, corridors are an important type of spatial pattern that occur in many types of human-dominated landscapes. In landscape ecology corridors are a part of one of the fundamental models proposed by Richard Forman in his patch-corridor-matrix model (1995). In landscape architecture, corridors are a fundamental structure for defining space as in the point-line-plane model that is learned by every design student. In addition, corridors are an important part of greenway planning for landscape flows, such as recreation, watershed management, and wildlife movement (see Fabos 2004). 城市景观生态英文文献和中文翻译(6):http://www.751com.cn/fanyi/lunwen_51862.html