Meaningful and Meaningless Statements in Landscape Ecology and Environmental Sustainability

Fred S. Roberts ()
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Fred S. Roberts: Rutgers University

A chapter in Clusters, Orders, and Trees: Methods and Applications, 2014, pp 297-312 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The growing population and increasing pressures for development lead to challenges to life on our planet. Increasingly, we are seeing how human activities affect the natural environment, including systems that sustain life: climate, healthy air and water, arable land to grow food, etc. There is growing interest (and urgency) in understanding how changes in human activities might lead to long-term sustainability of critical environmental systems. Of particular interest are large ecological systems that affect climate, air and water, etc. Landscape Ecology is concerned with such systems. Understanding the challenges facing our planet requires us to summarize data, understand claims, and investigate hypotheses. To be useful, these summaries, claims, and hypotheses are often stated using metrics of various kinds, using a variety of scales of measurement. The modern theory of measurement shows us that we have to be careful using scales of measurement and that sometimes statements using such scales can be meaningless—in a very precise sense. This paper summarizes the theory of meaningful and meaningless statements in measurement and applies it to statements in landscape ecology and environmental sustainability.

Keywords: Measurement; Meaningfulness; Landscape ecology; Environmental sustainability; Biodiversity; Indices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:spochp:978-1-4939-0742-7_18

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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4939-0742-7_18

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