Strengthening Landscape Ecology’s Contribution to a Sustainable Environment - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 26

requires teams of researchers from multiple disciplines and relevant members of
the community to be involved in the analysis of the possible socio-economic
interactions and constraints among the agreed set of objectives and management
actions (Tress et al. 2005a , b , 2007 ; Fry et al. 2007 ). This necessitates ongoing
dialogue amongst the research team, stakeholder groups and the wider community.
However, it needs to be acknowledged here that true socio-economic and eco-
logical data integration may not be possible or necessary (Brown and Pullar 2011 ).
Stage 4: Understand risks and uncertainties. Risks and uncertainties are
inherent in landscape sustainability problems and need to be acknowledged and
incorporated into any decision making framework. Risk is the chance that an
adverse outcome occurs (Burgman et al. 1993 ), while uncertainty arises from an
imperfect understanding of a system (Regan et al. 2002 ). An important role for
landscape ecologists is to integrate the quantification of uncertainty into decision
making processes, while acknowledging that definitions of risk and uncertainty
vary across stakeholders and experts (Stirling 1998 ; Wynne 1992 ).
Landscape ecologists have focussed considerable effort on developing methods
for understanding and quantifying risk and uncertainty in landscape patterns and
processes (See Sheppard Chap. 7 , this volume; also Mooij and DeAngelis 2003 ;
Shao and Wu 2008 ), but specific links to the implications for decision making and
landscape planning are often not made. Consequently, landscape ecologists need to
more fully integrate methods for quantifying uncertainty into the problem-solving
processes. Much of the expertise for quantitatively dealing with uncertainty in
decision making lies in fields of mathematics and the decision sciences (e.g.,
Stewart 2005 ; Ben-Haim 2006 ), and for qualitatively dealing with uncertainty lies
in the planning and policy sciences (e.g., Renn et al. 1993 ; Innes 1996 ; Smith and
Wales

1999 ). Therefore, this will require considerable collaboration among

landscape ecologists and researchers in other fields.
Stage 5: Decision analysis. Decision analysis is a process by which the outcome
of a set of management actions are evaluated in terms of explicit pre-defined
management objectives and constraints (Clemen 1996 ). Its key strength is that it
provides a formal process for bringing together the components described above in
a coherent fashion. Decision analysis requires the formal linking of specific
management objectives, management actions, system understanding and uncer-
tainty within a coherent framework. Importantly, by formally linking these factors,
decision analysis promotes the integration of the different components of a deci-
sion problem. Therefore, by embracing decision analysis within a formal problem-
solving framework, landscape ecologists are better positioned to move towards a
much more integrated science. Specific attention to the governance of the decision
process also guards against vested interests, enhances ownership of the problem
and ensures the incorporation of a broad range of socio-economic and environ-
mental values (Van Driesche and Lane 2002 ; Rayner and Howlett 2009 ).
Stage 6: Implementing landscape management and planning actions. This stage
of the framework involves implementing the preferred landscape management
actions identified and evaluated in the above stages. Traditionally, landscape
ecologists have had little involvement with this stage of the problem-solving