Managing Changing Landscapes on the Northern Prairies: Using Functional Groups and Guilds

摘要

"This article reviews how the northern prairie landscapes have changed since European agricultural seulement at the broad ecosystem level. Society has developed a broad-scale relationship with this landscape that is complex, causal, and non-linear, and investigating human-environment interactions needs to be addressed in terms of ecological functions and hierarchies. Ecosystem functions are examined in lerms of changes in both landscape level vegetation and breeding bird guilds. Human land use has increasingly sculptured the landscape to the point where sociely now influences all ecological levels of the region, altering not only species assemblages but also how the entire ecosystem functions. Thus, we must also look at our management of the systemat the ecosystem level. Using this approach, some general strategies are outlined to manage northern prairie ecosystems, with an emphasis on using changes in biolic guilds as an overall indication of ecosystem health.