As landscape ecology has developed over the past quarter-century, applications of its basic results have become widespread in applied conservation biology. Some applications have been distortions of the basic research results by oversimplification. For example, the original meaning of connectivity became streamlined into “corridors” and applied as a simple solution to all fragmentation problems. Many such applications have been essentially random and without demonstrable measures of success or failure. At the opposite extreme, results of simulation models have been applied globally without measures of effect that would constitute real tests of the reality of the model results. In both these extreme cases, the missing link was some quantitative measure capable of demonstrating statistically what had been achieved by the conservation application derived from the results of fundamental research.

The contributors to this volume each advance ways to increase the connectivity between the advancing front of fundamental ecological knowledge and the application of that knowledge in conservation. Managers and applied ecologists attempt to correct, improve, or guide ecological processes or the structural surrogates of those processes. Without a target, quantitatively defined in terms of the system's processes or structures, the effect of applications cannot be assessed.

Conservation applications can be better connected to the knowledge base, current theory, and valid statistical analysis if basic research provides targets that can be used in applications. Those targets and how to provide them is what this volume is about.