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Landscapes
are undergoing change constantly.
Forests get converted into
crops, crops into neighborhoods,
and neighborhoods into shopping
malls, all in attempt to
meet our needs for food,
shelter, and household goods.
Human beings are not the
only force of change. Environmental
processes can be just as
powerful. Frequent wildfires
are necessary to keep the
eastern hardwood forests
from advancing onto the
western prairies.
As
landscapes change, due to human
and natural causes, certain features
are at risk of being lost or replaced
by the introduction of new features
in the landscape. Such threatened
features may be intimately related
to the history, culture or ecology
of the landscape. They may also
have economic or aesthetic value
worth preserving.
The
process of landscape change invariably
raises a host of local land use
questions. For example, what features
in the landscape are important
enough to be protected. What new
features are desired in the landscape?
And, how can we improve the landscape's
sustainability and livability?
In
response to these very important
questions, members of the College
of Architecture and Landscape
Architecture and
the College
of Food, Agricultural and Natural
Resource Sciences at
the University
of Minnesota,
created the Center for Changing
Landscapes (CCL). The Center links
innovative landscape planning
and design with technical expertise
in natural resource management
and geospatial analysis and modeling.
The
goal of the Center is to address
issues of sustainability in changing
rural, urban and urbanizing landscapes.
To do so, the Center uses remote
sensing, geographic information
systems, spatial modeling to predict
future change, and landscape design
to generate sustainable solutions
to land use questions at various
landscape levels including regional,
sub-regional, district, neighborhood
and site levels.
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