Abstract
Recent concern over possible ways to sustain ecosystem services has triggered important research worldwide on ecosystem processes at the landscape scale. Understanding this complexity of landscape functioning calls for coupled and spatially-explicit modelling approaches. However, disciplinary boundaries have limited the number of multi-process studies at the landscape scale, and current progress in coupling processes at this scale often reveals strong imbalance between biotic and abiotic processes, depending on the core discipline of the modellers. We propose a spatially-explicit, unified conceptual framework that allows researchers from different fields to develop a shared view of agricultural landscapes. In particular,we distinguish landscape elements that are mobile in space and represent biotic or abiotic objects (for example water, fauna or flora populations), and elements that are immobile and represent fixed landscape elements with a given geometry (for example ditch section or plot). The shared representation of these elements allows setting common objects and spatio-temporal process boundaries that may otherwise differ between disciplines. We present guidelines and an assessment of the applicability of this framework to a virtual landscape system with realistic properties. This framework allows the complex system to be represented with a limited set of concepts but leaves the possibility to include current modelling strategies specific to biotic or abiotic disciplines. Future operational challenges include model design, space and time discretization, and the availability of both landscape modelling platforms and data.
Highlights
The emergence of the ecosystem service concept (Costanza et al, 1997) has ignited interest in the landscape-oriented disciplines and stressed the need for an integrated view of landscapes
They differ from other landscapes in that they are mainly managed for food or feed production and under strong influence of human activities, agricultural landscapes shelter a large range of processes, which are either abiotic or biotic
The framework represents the landscape characteristics and processes with five generic landscape features: 1. Time-variant landscape mosaics, that are composed of Immobile Landscape Elements (ILE) such as fields, ditches, soil units, etc
Summary
Recent concern over possible ways to sustain ecosystem services has triggered important research worldwide on ecosystem processes at the landscape scale. Understanding this complexity of landscape functioning calls for coupled and spatially-explicit modeling approaches. We present guidelines and an assessment of the applicability of this framework to a virtual landscape system with realistic properties. This framework allows the complex system to be represented with a limited set of concepts but leaves the possibility to include current modeling strategies specific to biotic or abiotic disciplines.
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