Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 83

also requires capacity building in the social component, including social
learning, multilevel governance, adaptive management and transition man-
agement (Lebel et al. 2006 ; Pahl-Wostl 2006 ; Foxon et al. 2009 ).
5.5 Community-Based Planning of Sustainable Landscape
Change: What Science can Deliver
5.5.1 Landscape Change as Social-Ecological System
Dynamics
Considered as the result of a long standing interaction between humanity and the
biophysical system, the landscape can be described as a social-ecological system
(SES) (Walker et al. 2004 ; Matthews and Selman 2006 ). Human users adjust it for
better performance (Taylor Lovell and Johnson 2009 ). This interdependency is
two-way (Fig. 5.2 ): (1) use and valuation: humans value the current performance
of the landscape for its benefits, and (2) intentional landscape change: humans
intervene in the biophysical system, aiming at improved benefits or at ensuring its
Fig. 5.2 Schematic representation of the landscape as a social-ecological system, consisting of a
biophysical and social component, each including a pattern-process relationship. Ecological and
social networks functionally link sites across the landscape area. Defined at the local scale level,
it is being affected by biophysical, socio-economic and political processes at higher levels of
scale