Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 78

so crucial for sustainability science. The term ''landscape'' is used by planners and
landscape architects and is also used in social sciences, whereas ''ecosystem'' is
not. For example, Macleod et al. ( 2007 ), in their paper on sustainable catchment
management, use the word landscape to denote the management unit, but not
''ecosystem''. While ''ecosystem'' is increasingly becoming a core concept in
environmental science and associated with nature, biodiversity, and environmental
protection, ''landscape'' is a broader concept because more disciplines recognise it
as a meaningful concept.
Furthermore, the term landscape services is more relevant and legitimate to
local communities. Although this is not investigated, local actors may associate
landscape services with the multidisciplinary character of their environment, so
with the place where they live and work and for which they are responsible,
whereas ecosystems are associated with areas where natural processes prevail.
When the term ecosystem services is used in papers on collaborative management,
the subject is often about managing large areas with a natural character, such as
semi-natural farms in Arizona or a Wetland area in Sweden (Olsson et al. 2004 ;
Schultz et al. 2007 ).
Based on these lines of argument, I prefer landscape services (as proposed by
Termorshuizen and Opdam 2009 ) as a unifying concept linking the biophysical
landscape to the local community, to apply in community-based sustainable
landscape planning. It is essentially modified from the ecosystem services concept,
but emphasizes that the service producing system is the people's local environ-
ment, the place for which they feel responsible, with distinct spatial elements that
they can change to generate ecological, social, and economic value.
5.3 A Focus on Green Infrastructure
Cultural landscapes often are intensively used by humans for food production,
working and living. The physical pattern of these landscapes, rural as well as urban
ones, often takes the shape of a mosaic in which patches for production of food or
for housing and commercial functions are intertwined by a pattern of longitudinal
and small patch-shaped elements with a more natural character. These elements
include waterways and their margins, roads and their margins, margins of arable
land, woodlots and hedgerows, and amenity grassland. For this pattern several
terms are being used that emphasize their functional connectedness: ecological
networks (Opdam et al. 2006 ), green infrastructure (Benedict and MacMahon
2006 ; Horwood 2012 ), green-blue networks (Steingröver et al. 2010 ) and green
veining (Grashof-Bokdam and Van Langevelde 2004 ). In this chapter I use ''green
infrastructure'' to underline the fine-grained network structure composed of both
terrestrial and aquatic landscape elements.
The green infrastructure, by supporting biophysical processes, provides func-
tions that if valued by humans (Fig. 5.1 ) turn into services. For example, green
infrastructure supports water regulation functions (Herzon and Helenius 2008 ),