Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 77

The concept of ecosystem services connects ecosystems to humans. I will use
the definition proposed by Fischer et al. ( 2009 ): ''ecosystem services are the
aspects of ecosystems utilized (actively or passively) to produce human well-
being''. Fisher et al. pointed out that services must be ecological phenomena, but
that they do not have to be utilized directly. The original motive for launching this
concept is that framing the value of biodiversity in the context of socio-economic
benefits might improve the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation strategies,
either as an alternative or as an extension to the intrinsic value of biodiversity.
Most of the literature on ecosystem services is still framed in the context of
conservation planning: large geographical scale, protected areas, biodiversity
conservation and economic value of biodiversity and natural ecosystems. There-
fore, although the term ecosystem services might serve as a boundary concept in
the science-policy interface, this will not automatically be the case for bringing
together scientists and local communities. In this section I advocate the use of the
term landscape services as a special case of ecosystem services for use in local
level landscape planning.
Sustainable landscape development is all about values in the landscape that are
recognized by the human society. If, then, the landscape is framed as a value-
producing system (following Termorshuizen and Opdam 2009 ), it appears that the
unique contribution of landscape ecology to sustainable landscape development is
the understanding of how the spatial pattern relates to the functioning of the
landscape as a system. To make spatial pattern explicit in understanding the added
value of landscape change is most critical in multifunctional, fragmented land-
scapes, because it is here that the provision of services heavily depends on the
spatial configuration of small landscape elements, on top of the characteristics of
the individual elements. An example is pest suppression in crops by parasitic and
predatory insects, which need a specific structure of landscape elements to develop
a viable population (Bianchi et al. 2006 ). The spatial position of the supply of
services compared with the position of the service users is also important. For
example, the effect of placing ditches or vegetation strips for flood regulation very
much depends on the relative position of the elements in the catchment area. These
intricate relationships between the spatial pattern of landscape elements and the
provision of services is one reason for preferring the term landscape services over
ecosystem services (Termorshuizen and Opdam 2009 ). The term emphasizes the
importance of spatial pattern and the spatial relations linking landscape patches,
whereas the ecosystem concept highlights the functional (vertical) relationships
within ecosystem patches (a.o. O'Neill 2001 ).
A second reason for preferring landscape services is that the landscape is the
result of the interplay between natural and human processes. While in the defi-
nition of ecosystems natural processes prevail (Fisher et al. 2009 ), the provisioning
of landscape services very much depends on systems in which humans have a
dominant role.
A third reason for preferring landscape services over ecosystem services, as
proposed by Termorshuizen and Opdam ( 2009 ), is that the term better unifies
scientific disciplines and therefore fosters interdisciplinary approaches which are