Landscape
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or human-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal. A landscape includes the physical elements of geophysically defined landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of land use, buildings, and structures, and transitory elements such as lighting and weather conditions. Combining both their physical origins and the cultural overlay of human presence, often created over millennia, landscapes reflect a living synthesis of people and place that is vital to local and national identity.
The character of a landscape helps define the self-image of the people who inhabit it and a sense of place that differentiates one region from other regions. It is the dynamic backdrop to people's lives. Landscape can be as varied as farmland, a landscape park or wilderness. The Earth has a vast range of landscapes including the icy landscapes of polar regions, mountainous landscapes, vast arid desert landscapes, islands, and coastal landscapes, densely forested or wooded landscapes including past boreal forests and tropical rainforests and agricultural landscapes of temperate and tropical regions. The activity of modifying the visible features of an area of land is referred to as landscaping.
Definition and etymology
There are several definitions of what constitutes a landscape, depending on context. In common usage however, a landscape refers either to all the visible features of an area of land, often considered in terms of aesthetic appeal, or to a pictorial representation of an area of countryside, specifically within the genre of landscape painting. When people deliberately improve the aesthetic appearance of a piece of land—by changing contours and vegetation, etc.—it is said to have been landscaped, though the result may not constitute a landscape according to some definitions.Color landscapes blend artificial elements like buildings, roads, and pavements with natural features such as mountains, forests, plants, sky, and rivers. These compositions of distant and near views can significantly impact people's emotions. As urbanization rapidly advances, urban color landscape design has become essential for cities to differentiate and symbolize their unique character and atmosphere. However, this transformation has created challenges. First, the traditional color landscapes in some cities have been heavily influenced by natural geography, climate, local materials, ethnic culture, religion, and socioeconomic factors. Second, the growing problem of "color pollution" - through bright, solid-colored buildings, billboards, and lighting clusters - adversely affects people physically and psychologically. Third, homogenization of colors between cities is causing a loss of cultural identity, as many modern buildings share similar palettes, diluting local characteristics. Researchers have proposed more unified cityscape approaches to address these color landscape issues and help cities preserve their distinctive identities and create vibrant, emotionally engaging urban environments.
The word landscape arrived in England—and therefore into the English language—after the fifth century, following the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons; these terms referred to a system of human-made spaces on the land. The term landscape emerged around the turn of the sixteenth century to denote a painting whose primary subject matter was natural scenery. Land may be taken in its sense of something to which people belong. The suffix -scape is equivalent to the more common English suffix -ship. The roots of -ship are etymologically akin to Old English sceppan or scyppan, meaning to shape. The suffix -schaft is related to the verb schaffen, so that -ship and shape are also etymologically linked. The modern form of the word, with its connotations of scenery, appeared in the late sixteenth century when the term landschap was introduced by Dutch painters who used it to refer to paintings of inland natural or rural scenery. The word landscape, first recorded in 1598, was borrowed from a Dutch painters' term. The popular conception of the landscape that is reflected in dictionaries conveys both a particular and a general meaning, the particular referring to an area of the Earth's surface and the general being that which can be seen by an observer. An example of this second usage can be found as early as 1662 in the Book of Common Prayer:
File:El Turbó.jpg|thumb|Pre-Pyrenees and Pyrenees
There are several words that are frequently associated with the word landscape:
- Scenery: The natural features of a landscape considered in terms of their appearance, esp. when picturesque: spectacular views of mountain scenery.
- Setting: In works of narrative, it includes the historical moment in time and geographic location in which a story takes place, and helps initiate the main backdrop and mood for a story.
- Picturesque: The word literally means "in the manner of a picture; fit to be made into a picture", and used as early as 1703, and derived from an Italian term pittoresco, "in the manner of a painter". Gilpin's Essay on Prints defined picturesque as "a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture".
- A view: "A sight or prospect of some landscape or extended scene; an extent or area covered by the eye from one point".
- Wilderness: An uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable region. See also Natural landscape.
- Cityscape : The urban equivalent of a landscape. In the visual arts a cityscape is an artistic representation, such as a painting, drawing, print or photograph, of the physical aspects of a city or urban area.
- Seascape: A photograph, painting, or other work of art which depicts the sea, in other words an example of marine art.
Physical landscape
Geomorphology: The physical evolution of landscape
is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of topographic and bathymetric features created by physical or chemical processes operating at or near Earth's surface. Geomorphologists seek to understand why landscapes look the way they do, to understand landform history and dynamics and to predict changes through a combination of field observations, physical experiments and numerical modeling. Geomorphology is practiced within physical geography, geology, geodesy, engineering geology, archaeology and geotechnical engineering. This broad base of interests contributes to many research styles and interests within the field.The surface of Earth is modified by a combination of surface processes that sculpt landscapes, and geologic processes that cause tectonic uplift and subsidence, and shape the coastal geography. Surface processes comprise the action of water, wind, ice, fire, and living things on the surface of the Earth, along with chemical reactions that form soils and alter material properties, the stability and rate of change of topography under the force of gravity, and other factors, such as human alteration of the landscape. Many of these factors are strongly mediated by climate. Geologic processes include the uplift of mountain ranges, the growth of volcanoes, isostatic changes in land surface elevation, and the formation of deep sedimentary basins where the surface of Earth drops and is filled with material eroded from other parts of the landscape. The Earth surface and its topography therefore are an intersection of climatic, hydrologic, and biologic action with geologic processes.
List of different types of landscape
, Plain, Taiga, Tundra, Wetland, Mountain, Mountain range, Cliff, Coast, Littoral zone, Glacier, Polar regions of Earth, Shrubland, Forest, Rainforest, Woodland, Jungle, Moors, Steppe, Valley.Landscape ecology
is the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems. This is done within a variety of landscape scales, development spatial patterns, and organizational levels of research and policy.Landscape is a central concept in landscape ecology. It is, however, defined in quite different ways. For example: Carl Troll conceives of landscape not as a mental construct but as an objectively given 'organic entity', a harmonic individuum of space.
Ernst Neef defines landscapes as sections within the uninterrupted earth-wide interconnection of geofactors which are defined as such on the basis of their uniformity in terms of a specific land use, and are thus defined in an anthropocentric and relativistic way.
According to Richard Forman and Michael Godron, a landscape is a heterogeneous land area composed of a cluster of interacting ecosystems that is repeated in similar form throughout, whereby they list woods, meadows, marshes and villages as examples of a landscape's ecosystems, and state that a landscape is an area at least a few kilometres wide.
John A. Wiens opposes the traditional view expounded by Carl Troll, Isaak S. Zonneveld, Zev Naveh, Richard T. T. Forman/Michel Godron and others that landscapes are arenas in which humans interact with their environments on a kilometre-wide scale; instead, he defines 'landscape'—regardless of scale—as "the template on which spatial patterns influence ecological processes".
Some define 'landscape' as an area containing two or more ecosystems in close proximity.