Landscape ecology is a discipline between regionally oriented geography and biology, which studies both natural and anthropic landscapes, paying special attention to human groups as transforming agents of their physical-ecological dynamics. This discipline or this branch has received contributions from both physical geography and biology, since although geography provides the structural visions of the landscape (the study of the horizontal structure or the mosaic of sub-ecosystems that make up the landscape), biology provides the functional vision of the landscape (the vertical relationships of matter and energy).[1][2][3]​ This concept began to be developed in 1898, with the geographer, father of Russian pedology, Vasily Vasilievich. Dokuchaev and was later continued by the German geologist Carl Troll. By the way, it is a discipline closely related to other areas such as geochemistry, geobotany, forestry sciences and soil science.

The regionalization landscape approach considers that the landscape is the joint result of environmental factors (e.g. relief, climate, biotic factors), and that a hierarchy of these cannot be found to explain its structure.

Landscape ecology studies a level of organization of the higher matter of the ecosystem. A landscape, in biology, is a set at a regional level of different internally homogeneous units or tesserae under the same functional processes. It is sometimes said that a landscape is the repetition in space of a set of ecosystems.

The definition of landscape given by ecology and geography differs in some aspects, but in general it can be said that geography stimulates the investigation of structural aspects and ecology the functional aspects.[4]​.

Landscapes can be conceived as ecosystems defined on a larger scale than ecotopes, and therefore share general attributes that can be encompassed within general systems theory.

Landscape ecology is one of the possible approaches in evaluating the environmental impact of human works and activities, and is mainly used in territorial planning and in the dynamic analysis of ecosystems.

Heterogeneity") is a key notion within landscape ecology, since this discipline uses concepts linked to the distribution of different elements that compose it.[5]​.