IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/spochp/978-1-4939-0742-7_18.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Meaningful and Meaningless Statements in Landscape Ecology and Environmental Sustainability

In: Clusters, Orders, and Trees: Methods and Applications

Author

Listed:
  • Fred S. Roberts

    (Rutgers University)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Fred S. Roberts, 2014. "Meaningful and Meaningless Statements in Landscape Ecology and Environmental Sustainability," Springer Optimization and Its Applications, in: Fuad Aleskerov & Boris Goldengorin & Panos M. Pardalos (ed.), Clusters, Orders, and Trees: Methods and Applications, edition 127, pages 297-312, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:spochp:978-1-4939-0742-7_18
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4939-0742-7_18
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pollesch, N. & Dale, V.H., 2015. "Applications of aggregation theory to sustainability assessment," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 117-127.
    2. Pollesch, N.L. & Dale, V.H., 2016. "Normalization in sustainability assessment: Methods and implications," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 195-208.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:spochp:978-1-4939-0742-7_18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.