An important trend in conservation science over the last three decades in particular has been the steady increase in our understanding of how ecosystem processes depend on biodiversity and other biophysical structures and patterns and how these patterns and the processes they sustain change over time. To have any chance of sustaining ecosystem processes, managers must evaluate patterns at the landscape scale.
From an ecological and conservation standpoint, landscapes are usually defined as heterogeneous land area[s] composed of a cluster of interacting ecosystems that is repeated throughout (Forman and Godron 1986). In other words, a landscape has both diversity but also coherency and repetition. Impacts to these patterns can alter ecosystem processes, sometimes to a point of state change where the ability to sustain historic processes is permanently lost.