Abstract
Attractive landscapes are diverse and resilient landscapes that provide a multitude of essential ecosystem services. The development of landscape policy to protect and improve landscape attractiveness, thereby ensuring the provision of ecosystem services, is ideally adapted to region specific landscape characteristics. In addition, trends in landscape attractiveness may be linked to certain policies, or the absence of policies over time. A spatial and temporal evaluation of landscape attractiveness is thus desirable for landscape policy development. In this paper, landscape attractiveness was spatially evaluated for Flanders (Belgium) using landscape indicators derived from geospatial data as a case study. Large local differences in landscape quality in (i) rural versus urban areas and (ii) between the seven agricultural regions in Flanders were found. This observed spatial variability in landscape attractiveness demonstrated that a localized approach, considering the geophysical characteristics of each individual region, would be required in the development of landscape policy to improve landscape quality in Flanders. Some trends in landscape attractiveness were related to agriculture in Flanders, e.g., a slight decrease in total agricultural area, decrease in dominance of grassland, maize and cereals, a decrease in crop diversity, sharp increase in the adoption of agri-environmental agreements (AEA) and a decrease in bare soil conditions in winter. The observed trends and spatial variation in landscape attractiveness can be used as a tool to support policy analysis, assess the potential effects of future policy plans, identify policy gaps and evaluate past landscape policy.
Highlights
An attractive landscape is more than merely a visually appealing landscape
We focused on aspects of the landscape with a clear linkage to ecosystem service provisioning, i.e., the structural appearance of the landscape, its ecological value and agricultural management practices
The Dunes region was the area most heavily affected by urbanization, followed by the Sandy region, whereas the Weidestreek clearly had the least proportion of impervious surfaces and more nature compared to the other regions
Summary
An attractive landscape is more than merely a visually appealing landscape. It is defined as a resilient and diverse landscape providing a multitude of ecosystem services and playing a key role in overcoming some of the pressing challenges of the 21st century such as climate change and urbanization [1,2,3]. The European Landscape Convention encourages EU Member States to monitor, protect and improve the attractiveness of the European landscape [1]. Monitoring and policy development to protect and improve landscape attractiveness should go hand in hand [1]. Qualitative data on landscape attractiveness can be very useful in foresight exercises, which are often used in future (rural) policy development [4]
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