Landscape practise and key concepts for landscape sustainability

Abstract

Conceptual frameworks which have seen man and nature as being an integrated whole were widespread before they became suppressed by developments within both capitalism and socialism. Therefore an idealistic use of such concepts in scientific work has often had limited practical value. At the same time, the practice behind such conceptual frameworks has survived in many land use systems, being a fundamental source of inspiration for the modern challenge of landscape sustainability. Here, the concept and practice of carrying capacity is used as an example. We provide a modern interpretation and relate it to an empirical study of sustainable tourism in eight protected areas and their regions in the Baltic. They are subject to large differences in human pressure. The political commitment to the related EU Natura 2000 networks has been taken as our point of departure for a more detailed analysis of accessibility and its related conflicts, and opportunities for a sustainable development of tourism in and around the protected areas. It is concluded that the concept of carrying capacity cannot meaningfully be used for sustainability studies at an abstract conceptual level, but proves its relevance through a detailed context specific analyses of visitor related conflicts.

Landscape agronomy: a new field for addressing agricultural landscape dynamics

“…These two examples highlight the different ways in which patterns and resources in agricultural landscapes are affected by past and current farming practices. Accordingly, we deem that the systematic inclusion of the study of farming practices into landscape research would help to increase our knowledge of the relationships between landscape patterns and agro-ecosystem services, such as the preservation of functional biodiversity (Moonen and Bàrberi 2008) or the improvement of spatial heterogeneity (Brandt et al 2012), and would allow us to steer these services in future landscapes. Recent research on farming practices has highlighted the need to collect a large amount of data in order to characterize the real practices and choices of farmers over long time-spans (to overcome seasonal variability) and wide regions (to skip local specificities) (e.g., Mignolet 2008;Leenhardt et al 2010).…”

Natural potentials of significance for the sustainable tourism development - the focus on the special nature reserve

“…It is also a basic prerequisite for the development of sustainable tourism development (Trišić, 2019). On this occasion, the principles of sustainable development, environment, and economic benefits must be taken into account (Brandt, Christensen, Svenningsen, & Holmes, 2013). We can say that sustainable development is a general direction, the desire to create a better world, balancing social, economic, and environmental factors (Štetić & Šimičević, 2018).…”

Landscape and cultural sustainability

“…Sustainability of landscapes or sustainable landscapes have often been viewed through a 'pillar approach', whereby various aspects or dimensions of sustainability ecological, social and economichave been considered (Wu & Hobbs 2002;Antrop 2006;Musacchio 2009;Palang et al 2011a;Brandt et al 2012;Soini & Birkeland 2014). Much of this landscape research has concerned ecological sustainability, such as landscape diversity and landscape dynamics.…”