Biodiversity at the landscape level: recent concepts and perspectives for multifunctional land use

Abstract

The interest of scientists, policy makers, and the general public in the concept of ‘multifunctional’ landscapes has increased enormously in recent years. The fact that landscapes provide a large number of beneficial functions and services to human beings, which go far beyond agriand silvicultural production, is now widely accepted (Foley et al. 2005). Non-commodity outputs as well as a wide array of ecosystem functions are considered to be indispensable properties of landscapes, and decision-makers are challenged by the need to consider all relevant landscape functions in management decisions at all spatial scales and each administrative level (Pinto-Correia et al. 2006). The concept of landscape multifunctionality is obviously closely related with landscape sustainability, but emphasizes more strongly the land user’s and stakeholder’s perspective. In the European Union, the ‘multifunctionality of agriculture’ has become the key concept of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (Tait 2001). Multifunctionality is promoted by the EU in response to liberalisation pressures, and is seen as a way to address social and ecological concerns such as farm abandonment and biodiversity loss through agricultural subsidy policies (Potter and Burney 2002; Hollander 2004; Potter 2006). The benefits of agriculture to rural development, regulation functions and biodiversity are currently rewarded with an increasing share of EU-agricultural subsidies being transferred towards the production of ecosystem goods and services. The resulting regional agrienvironmental schemes of the member states pursue to secure the conservation and sustainable development of the old cultural landscapes (Vos and Meekes 1999; Deuffic and Candau 2006; Holloway et al. 2006; Potter 2006). However, while the concept of ‘multifunctionality’ receives also recognition outside the EU (USA: Hollander 2004; Bills and Gross 2005, Canada: Maxey 2006; Robinson 2006, Australia: Anderson 2000; Cocklin et al. 2006), it becomes increasingly evident that there is often a gap between the claim and reality of environmental (e.g., Kleijn et al. 2001), economic (e.g., Brunstad et al. 2005) or social effects (e.g., Gafsi et al. 2006) of agricultural policies. Thus, to create effective policies for the sustainable development of multifunctional landscapes, there is a demand of society and A. Otte (&) D. Simmering Division of Landscape Ecology and Landscape Planning, Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Biosystems, Land Use, and Nutrition (IFZ), Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Heinrich-Buff-Ring 26-32, Giessen D-35392, Germany e-mail: annette.otte@agrar.uni-giessen.de