Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 76

embedded in local communities rather than organized as a government-led top
down process. In the context of social-ecological systems, Armitage et al. ( 2009 )
described the term adaptive co-management as ''a flexible system of resource
management, tailored to specific places and situations, supported by and working
in conjunction with various organizations at different scales''. Based on this I
understand community-based landscape planning as a process in which local
communities develop a shared vision on their desired landscape, and collectively
take decisions and organize action to adapt the physical structure of the landscape
to realize their aims. In this chapter I explore how the emerging concept of
ecosystem services, which typically connects the functioning of the landscapes to
the multiple interests and benefits of its users, can be developed in science to
become a common ground in community-based sustainable landscape planning.
To achieve this aim, I consider the multifunctional landscape as a social-
ecological system (as defined by Walker et al. 2006 ), providing services to users
and visitors (Termorshuizen and Opdam 2009 ), and spatially limitable by its
specific patterns of physical attributes and land use (Turner 1989 ). I explore a new
way of looking at landscape change, based on supply and demand of landscape
services. I consider how in the multifunctional landscape context local actors may
link landscape services to physical networks of relatively natural landscape
elements, while keeping in mind principles of sustainable landscape change. In
such a planning process science has a facilitating role. I will explore how the
current literature on ecosystem services provides knowledge and tools to facilitate
such community-based landscape planning. I close off with summarizing priority
research to build a much stronger foundation for landscape planning based on
ecosystem services, which will enhance the development of the sustainability
concept in landscape ecology.
5.2 Landscape Services: Why a New Term is Needed
If humans thus value the landscape for its benefits, we may describe the rela-
tionship with the term ecosystem service. The term ecosystem service was born in
the meeting zone between ecology and economy in the last decade of the 20th
century, and got a boost in science and in policy by the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment (MEA) organized on behalf of the United Nations (Carpenter et al.
2009 ). There has been a long lasting debate on what would be an appropriate
classification of types of ecosystem services (Wallace 2007 ; Constanza 2008 ).
I will use here three categories that can be directly linked to stakeholder interests:
(1) production services, such as the production of agricultural crops and fibres,
(2) regulation services such as the purification of water by marsh vegetation and
the pollination of commercial plants by wild bees, and (3) social services such
as the perception of the beauty of nature and the influence on human mental health
(following Hein et al. 2006 , but leaving out provisioning services which are
conditional to the other types rather than directly used).