Highly valued agricultural landscapes and their ecosystem services in the urban-rural fringe – an integrated approach

Abstract

Undermined by the increasing urban sprawl as well as intensification of agricultural production, the urban–rural fringe agricultural landscapes face challenges of ensuring viable food production, reducing environmental degradation and biodiversity loss, as well as sustaining rural development. Policies and strategies such as the Common Agricultural Policy, the European Landscape Convention and Biodiversity Strategy address these problems in their objectives, but they are based on different concepts regarding landscape functions and ecosystem services. To provide planners with a comprehensive landscape valuation framework, we refer to the policy objectives by assessing three rural landscape functions: environmental balance, food production and providing vital space to live, and tourist businesses with the use of landscape indicators and ecosystem services. We introduce the criteria of vulnerability to landscape changes, legal environmental protection, cultural heritage, scenic variety, and clarity to assess landscape values and water purification and retention, food production and recreational potential to assess ecosystem services. The results encourage the combination of the two approaches, since in a well-structured framework they complement each other in terms of covering different aspects of landscape value. An integrated approach to landscape assessment enables the picturing of more diverse values, and can better inform landscape and spatial planners. The novelty of this research is the use of landscape units as the basis for the application of ecosystem service and landscape valuation integrated assessment at the level that matches the scale of land use policy on the municipality level.