Strengthening Landscape Ecology’s Contribution to a Sustainable Environment - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 21

are highly degraded, 8 % are moderately degraded, 36 % are stable or slightly
degraded, and only 10 % are ranked as ''improving'' (Nachtergaele et al. 2011 ).
An increasing proportion of the world's biodiversity is listed as threatened (Pimm
et al. 2006 ; IUCN Red List). Addressing these challenges requires the develop-
ment of sustainable landscape management and planning strategies that help solve
current and anticipated environmental problems in a proactive, comprehensive and
cost-effective manner (Wu 2006 ; McAlpine et al. 2010 ).
In recent decades, landscape ecology has made considerable progress in
understanding the linkages between landscape structure, function and change,
particularly for managing and designing landscapes for conservation (Lindenma-
yer and Hobbs 2007 ). Landscape sustainability is becoming an increasingly
important focus for landscape ecology (Musacchio 2011 ;Wu 2012 ). It is a difficult
concept to define, but can be considered in terms of a landscape's adaptive
capabilities to cope with uncertainties rather than the maintenance of a landscape
in a static state (Wu 2012 ). Ecologically, landscape sustainability requires
avoiding irreversible change through careful management and continual ecological
improvement (Fischer et al. 2007 ; Mac Nally 2007 ). However, ultimately, the
sustainability paradigm is a human centred concept about meeting the needs of
people, now and in the future (Wiens 2012 ).
Landscape ecology has the potential to contribute significantly to landscape
sustainability and there are some signs of integrated, solution-driven research (Wu
2006 ), but its real impact on sustainable landscape management and planning is
still limited (Naveh 2007 ). Similar to much environmental research, there is a lack
of policy uptake, and a lack of implementation of research outcomes from land-
scape ecology. This stems partly from the division of knowledge into narrow,
specialist fields throughout the 20th century, and partly from the institutional and
social constraints to achieving landscape sustainability goals in many regions of
the world, especially those where development is poorly planned or unplanned.
There are three ways through which the contribution of landscape ecology to
landscape sustainability can be strengthened: (1) by better integrating bio-eco-
logical and humanistic perspectives in landscape ecology; (2) by adopting socio-
ecological thinking that focuses on the multiple functions of landscapes and the
multiple actors involved in their construction; and (3) by involvement in and
adoption of principles of adaptive management to deal with the complex and
uncertain responses of landscapes to changing conditions (McAlpine et al. 2010 ).
In essence, landscape ecology needs to increase involvement in and knowledge
exchange between the bio-sciences that are the main focus of landscape ecology
and the human-oriented decision sciences that are the main focus of land planning
(Vos et al. 2007 ; Termorshuizen and Opdam 2009 ). An example of this is the
pattern-process-design paradigm proposed by Nassauer and Opdam ( 2008 ) that
actively links landscape science and landscape planning to achieve vitally
important environmental and social outcomes. This new paradigm aims to improve
the impact of landscape science in society and enhance the saliency and legitimacy
of landscape ecological knowledge in addressing landscape sustainability prob-
lems (Nassauer and Opdam 2008 ).