Functional-dynamic approach to studying landscape boundaries

We provide a historical overview of the concepts of discreteness and continuity in the landscape sphere taking into account the concepts of characteristic time scale, factorial-dynamic series, and feedbacks between geocomponents. Promising directions for studying landscape boundaries were identified in several aspects: as a product of choosing the research scale, as a condition for the development of synergistic processes, as a result of changing types of intercomponent connections, as indicators of the spatial pattern dynamics, as a consequence of a change in functioning modes. We advocate a functional-dynamic approach to identifying landscape boundaries, which is based on the use of a time series of data to determine the range and frequency of possible geosystem states. On the example of the protected landscape “Aituar steppe” in the Southern Urals, we demonstrate the application of the hot spots analysis to distinguish natural complexes with different spatial and temporal organization of the phytoproduction process. The time series of vegetation indices NDVI was used to map the frequency of patches of increased phytomass and to identify pulsating boundaries between steppe and meadow units. The range of fluctuations in performance indicators in the course of long-term and seasonal dynamics serves as a useful indicator for localizing boundaries on maps, assessing their stability over time, and determining the width of ecotones.