In 1935 A.G. Tansley first proposed the scientific concept of the ecosystem (Tansley 1935). This prompted the German geographer Carl Troll to advance the term “landscape ecology” in 1939 (Troll 1971). Troll described landscape ecology as “the study of the main complex causal relationships between the life communities and their environment in a given section of the landscape.” Troll’s original goal was to show ecological distributions within landscapes. Importantly, the initial focus of the Russian and German efforts in landscape science and landscape ecology focused on continuous patterns of environmental variability and continuous population processes, in a way presaging the gradient concepts of American community ecology later proposed by Gleason (1926) and Whittaker (1967). However, landscape ecology shortly thereafter departed from this gradient framework, and instead evolved into an effort to divide landscapes into small components and ascertain the logic through which they were grouped and interacted as a landscape mosaic (Troll 1971). Troll sought to encourage closer collaboration between geographers and ecologists in the hope of strengthening the conceptual basis for landscape ecology (Naveh and Lieberman 1993).