Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 85

As for the role of landscape ecology in community-based planning, three fields
of research emerge from this process cycle, which will be discussed in the fol-
lowing sections:
• Assessment and valuation methods, by which local communities can assess how
and where the existing pattern of green infrastructure generates landscape
functions that are valued as services
• Design methods, by which local communities can find cost-effective ways to
adapt the landscape, based on knowledge of the response of the landscape to
land use and structural change
• Monitoring methods, by which local communities are informed about the
response of the landscape system, as a learning feed-back to the social system
5.5.2 Assessing Landscapes for the Provision
of Landscape Services
In the community-based planning process vision building is a key step; at its basis
is information from assessment and valuation. Typical questions are: what in the
actual landscape is valuable to me or to my group, which are the essential
underlying processes connected to those values? However, different actors have
different answers to these questions, and an important part of the planning pro-
cesses is that they deliberate about these diverging perceptions of the landscape.
Causes of such divergence may be different ethical views on the human-nature
relationship, different perceptions of system dynamics, different locations within
the area and different social and economic interests. This is the context of mapping
and valuation methods, which make Potschin and Haines Young ( 2012 ) to propose
the term place-based assessment of ecosystem services.
Mapping methods should inform local communities about the spatially explicit
relationship between biophysical patterns and value of landscape services. First
and for all, this requires a level of resolution that allows local actors to recognize
the pattern of the landscape where they live, the parts they own and the sites they
love. However, most of the published mapping attempts have chosen national
(Scolozzi et al. 2012 for Italy, Egoh et al. 2008 for South Africa) or regional (Chan
et al. 2006 part of California USA; Nelson et al. 2009 , part of Oregon USA;
Sherrouse et al. 2011 , Colorado USA, focussing at social values; Koschke et al.
2012 , administrative region in Germany) levels of spatial scale. For a recent local
scale mapping of ecosystem services, see Petz and Van Oudenhoven ( 2012 ).
Martinez-Harms and Balvanera ( 2012 ), after reviewing papers on mapping
approaches, concluded that services critical for human welfare (such as scenic
beauty, cultural identity, disease regulation) are rarely addressed in mapping.
These mapping approaches typically deliver spatially explicit information of
where in the area the actual landscape mosaic provides which ecosystem services,