The man has been interested in ecology, in a practical way, from the earliest days of its history. In primitive society every individual, to survive, it needed to have a concrete knowledge of their environment, ie, the forces of nature, plants and animals. The civilization began, in fact, when man learned to use fire and other tools to modify their environment, change the landscape. For humanity as a whole is even more necessary than ever to have an intelligent knowledge of the environment in which he lives; only its nature and quantitative relations were changing as the human population grew and expanded the power of man to alter the environment. The present paper refers precisely to this human interference in the environment. .
Ecology as a discipline is divided into several areas, one of them is landscape ecology that deals with the composition of the landscapes and the spatial arrangement of habitats within it, and how these patterns influence individuals, populations, communities and ecosystems in different spatial scales. These arrangements made by man in nature, have some negative effects on the environment. The most relevant is the edge effect, which is nothing more than a situation caused by fragmentation of habitats in which the microenvironment of the fragment edge is different from that of the interior of the fragment. .
Landscape ecology, as the name says, is the study the composition, structure and function of landscapes. It is defined by an interacting (e.g., ecosystems) relevant to some phenomenon under consideration. Thus, a landscape is an area of land containing an interesting pattern that affects and is affected by an ecological process of interest. Then it involves the study of these patterns, the interactions between the elements, and how these patterns and interactions change over time. In addition, landscape ecology involves the application of these principles in the formulation and solving of real-world problems.
