Quote Originally Posted by pepeguitarra View Post
An ecologist sees the landscape as a place where the ecological cycle of life happens. So, what does landscape photography have to do with anything other than represent that?

I'll bite!

I would venture that a lot of landscape photography is made by photographers who don't really understand what they're seeing in a scientific ways. Their focus is on things like beauty, form, shapes, light, etc.

So where the non-ecologist landscape photographer sees a meadow filled with beautiful plants and flowers, lit by spectacular morning light, the ecologist might focus on all the invasive plant and animal species that dominate in the meadow. The meadow might be “beautiful”, and the landscape photographer might make a beautiful picture, but the ecologist would take something different from that picture than the non-ecologist. The ecologist who was also an artist-photographer might want to show something other than the “beauty” of the meadow.

The project I pointed the OP to earlier is a kind of case in point. I started making those pictures simply because I loved the cedar wetland near my house. At the start, I didn’t realize that Thuja occidentalis (Eastern White Cedar) is not native to most of south-western Ontario, and that the trees I was photographing are likely part of a relic forest planted by the farmer who used to cultivate the land. I only saw the beauty. Ecologists like G. Waldron, author of the classic Trees of the Carolinian Forest book, would see a rather “meh” species that doesn't fit into the ecology of the Carolonian forest.

From this perspective, it’s clear to me what the OP is trying to do, and that it’s something different from pictures made by people who are not grounded in an understanding of ecology.