Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
show details of the landscape that matters to its users and owners, such as linear
elements and ponds
3. Mechanisms to drive the supply and demand of landscape services.This
requires an analysis of the structure of the network of land owners and land
users as connected by landscape services (for example as in Fig.
5.3
). Mech-
anisms may be based on a set of market-based rules, such as financial
arrangements and governmental incentives for producing services of common
interest, such as agri-environmental payments (GLB). How are such mecha-
nisms capable of organizing the desired change, do they promote coordinated
action (see Schouten et al.
2013
) and what is the outcome in terms of the
redistribution of benefits over stakeholders?
4. Conditions to ensure the long term delivery of landscape services. Many ser-
vices depend on assemblages of species, which are inherently fluctuating over
time and, secondly, may respond slowly to physical changes in the landscape.
This issue requires a reinterpretation of fragmentation and metapopulation lit-
erature in the light of the necessary species assemblages for particular services
and what physical conditions are required to ensure their existence. Important
topics include minimum thresholds of area and connectivity of green infra-
structure for service provision, not only for the level of the service, but also for
the reliability of service provisioning (Naeem
1998
) under variable weather
conditions and increased occurrence of extreme weather due to climate change
5. Multiple scale approaches how the added value of landscape change depends
on ecological and hydrological processes at higher levels of spatial scale, how
demands for landscape services are distributed across spatial scales, and
methods to incorporate such scale interdependencies into local decision making
(Opdam
2013
)
6. Developing resilience and adaptive capacity in governing landscapes for ser-
vice provisioning. This is an emerging topic in science (Carpenter and Folke
2006
) about dealing with uncertainty, complexity and perturbations in social-
ecological systems, but still largely theoretical. Walker and Salt (
2006
) have
proposed a set of criteria for developing resilience which have been used by
Schouten et al. (
2012
) to develop a framework for rural policy assessment. This
attempt could be further developed as an information system to create feed-
back between characteristics of the physical landscape and the social network.
Acknowledgments This chapter was inspired by many discussions with colleagues and on the
ground applications in research led by Alterra. I thank Eveliene Steingröver, Sabine van Rooij,
Carla Grashof, Severine van Bommel, JolandeTermorshuizen, Willemien Geertsema, Florence
van den Bosch and many others. The EU-financed Interreg project GIFT-T! has financially
contributed to the preparation of this chapter.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search