Like all landscapes, human perception and interaction with wetlands have changed as a result of alterations in demography, economy, environment, and technology. On the other hand, the mythical battle between Hercules and the Hydra in the Greek swamps of Lerna is viewed as a metaphor for the struggle to reclaim wetlands and make an insalubrious environment more amenable. Wetlands have frequently sported two opposing facades: on the one hand, the marshes of Mesopotamia are thought to be the inspiration for the Garden of Eden in the Old Testament.
Neither land nor sea, human interaction with wetlands often seems a study in contradictions. In the US alone there are more than 90 names used for wetlands, and while some are familiar (bog, bottomland, fen, moor, mangrove, marsh, peatland, tundra, swamp, etc.), differentiating between others is a specialized science. They make up a myriad of landforms that are inundated or saturated by water, part or all of the year, and support specialized vegetation adapted to such conditions. Wetlands are ecotones (transition zones) between terrestrial and aquatic environments. This will lead to the development of Critical Zone concepts similar to the ecotone concept in landscape ecology.
As Critical Zone research expands, scale will play a more and more important role. In the littoral zone of a lake, an ecotone is the transition zone of distinct aquatic communities that varies throughout the year according to seasonality ( Attrill and Rundle, 2002). Ecotones are dynamic, sometimes with strong fluctuations. Ecotones are used to define basic units in landscape studies, and their identification relies on the sharpness of the vegetation transition, particularly ecological conditions and their causes (i.e., natural or anthropogenic environmental change, invasion or alteration of species present) ( Walker et al., 2003). Price, in Developments in Earth Surface Processes, 2015 7.7.7 EcotonesĮcotones are abrupt changes in vegetation ( Walker et al., 2003) or two adjacent, different and homogeneous community types, producing a narrow ecological zone between them ( Attrill and Rundle, 2002).
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