Landscape ecology is an interdisciplinary field that emerged from several intellectual traditions in Europe and North America. An identifiable landscape ecology started in central Europe in the 1960s and in North America in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It became more visible with the establishment, in 1982, of the International Association of Landscape Ecology, with the publication of a major text in the field, Landscape Ecology, by Richard Forman and Michel Godron in 1984, and with the publication of the first issue of the association's journal, Landscape Ecology in 1987.

The phrase 'landscape ecology' was first used in 1939 by the German geographer, Carl Troll. He suggested that the "concept of landscape ecology is born from a marriage of two scientific outlooks, the one geographical (landscape), the other biological (ecology)." Troll coined the term landscape ecology to denote "the analysis of a physico-biological complex of interrelations, which govern the...