Richard T. T. Forman

Forman's model describes any territory with three elements. Patches are homogeneous areas: a wood, a park, an industrial estate. Corridors connect them: rivers, hedgerows, greenways. The matrix is the dominant fabric wrapping it all, which in a metropolitan area is the built-up land itself. With those three pieces you can read a map and predict which species will survive and which will not.

His rule most quoted by planners is that connectivity matters as much as area. Two large isolated parks support far less life than the same two parks joined by a corridor, because small populations go locally extinct and need to be recolonised from outside. Much of the green infrastructure now designed in Europe derives from that.

Born in 1935, Forman is professor emeritus of landscape ecology at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, a significant post in itself: he brought ecology into a school of architecture and planning. Landscape Ecology (1986), with Michel Godron, founded the discipline in the English-speaking world, and Land Mosaics (1995) is his major treatise.

Road Ecology (2003) opened a whole field by studying the road as an ecological element: not only roadkill, but the barrier effect, noise, salt, light and the invasive species that travel along its verges. Urban Regions (2008) and Urban Ecology (2014) apply the framework to the city and make a claim that suits planning well: there is no choice to be made between the compact city and nature, because compactness is precisely what leaves continuous land around it.