Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 88

provision (Feld et al. 2009 ). Such advanced knowledge could be linked to the large
landscape ecological knowledge-base which links biodiversity to landscape

structure at various levels of spatial scale.

5.5.3 Intervening in the Physical Landscape

In science, the usual approach in considering landscape change is either to describe
and quantify it as a process over time and analyse its drivers, or to focus on its
impact on biophysical phenomena, such as biodiversity, and socio-economic
processes such as the perception of change by inhabitants. Searching with Google
scholar for articles with the exact term landscape change planning (August 7,
2012) rendered only 5 hits, and with ''community-based landscape change'' I got
no hit at all. Under ''environmental governance'' most articles deal with social
processes, with little or no explicit attention to a change in the physical system. It
seems that while humans change landscapes throughout history, science has either
considered it as an unwanted ''impact'', or as something outside scientific focus.
Landscape design is mostly the domain of landscape architects, and not seen as a
scientific experiment (but see Nassauer and Opdam 2008 ).
Therefore, in the context of planning for added value by landscape services in
social-ecological systems, many unanswered questions can be posed. One chal-
lenge is to determine which actions create added value: which adaptation of the
physical pattern will turn into a better service provisioning, higher service reli-
ability or added economic or social value. The shape of the relationships between
structure and function and function and value is crucial information for decision-
making—will a certain investment lead to added value? Many of these relation-
ships are supposed to be nonlinear (Eiswerth and Haney 2001 ; Vos et al. 2001 ;
Barbier et al. 2008 ). Therefore, investments may vary between big gains in value
and a decrease in value, depending on the actual landscape structure (Farber et al.
2002 ; DeFries et al. 2004 ). If the relationship shows a threshold, it depends on the
actual landscape structure whether it is possible to improve a service or that it is
already at its maximum (Fig. 5.4 a). For example, increasing the spatial cohesion of
an area initially improves the performance of a specific population, but when
certain cohesion has been achieved, additional investments will not lead to further
improvement of performance. If the relationship follows a bell-shaped curve with
a single optimum (Fig. 5.4 b), investing in structure may initially increase the
function level, but further investment will lead to a loss of functioning (and thereby
of value). For example planting more and more trees to increase landscape quality
for recreation will eventually result in a forest which is less valued than half-open
landscape. Very little work has been done in quantifying such relationships, and it
is notable that recent reviews (Carpenter et al. 2009 ; De Groot et al. 2010 ; Seppelt
et al. 2011 ) did not address the importance of knowing how measures in the
landscape turn into added value.