Abstract
Landscape heterogeneity generates significant influences on economic activity. Present-day publications in landscape planning focus more and more on a participatory approach and a communication process. By contrast, we focus on nature-based criteria aimed at proper adaptation of planning decisions to natural landscape patterns. The paper proposes the framework aimed at considering geographical context, matter flows, and dynamic processes in projecting ecological network and perfect sites for various land use types as well as for choosing appropriate technologies. We use the example of a river basin in the taiga zone of European Russia, partially used for forestry and traditional agriculture. A landscape map, space images, and geochemical data are used to provide rationales for the necessary emergent effects resulting from proper proportions, neighborhoods, buffers, and shapes for lands use units. The proposed spatial arrangement of land use types and technologies ensures the coordination of socio-economic and ecological interests and preserves zonal background conditions, including runoff, soils, migration routes, and biodiversity. The allocation of arable lands and cutovers is aimed at minimizing undesirable matter flows that could cause qualitative changes in the geochemical environment.
Highlights
The term “landscape planning” or “landscape-ecological planning” is widely used both in science and nature management [1,2,3,4,5]
In addition to the cited methodology, we propose a number of tools aimed at understanding the contribution of landscape units to the regulation of lateral abiotic flows
Our research showed that a landscape-ecological approach to spatial planning requires the simultaneous and coordinated application of several models of spatial organization of nature
Summary
The term “landscape planning” or “landscape-ecological planning” is widely used both in science and nature management [1,2,3,4,5]. We concur with Ndubisi [6] that landscape-ecological investigation is a scientific foundation for the planning decision that examines both the vertical and horizontal structure of landscapes. The landscape is a constant living test for spatial planning and it allows assessing the appropriateness or inconsistency of human practices [7]. A landscape is an entity whose geographic scale depends on what type of land use is in focus in a planning process [8]. The opposite is true as well: a landscape as a natural heterogeneous unit determines an appropriate scale for each type of land use. We proceed from the understanding of geographical landscape as a “genetically uniform territory with regular and typical occurrence of interrelated combinations of geological composition, landforms, surface and ground waters, microclimates, soil types, phytocoenoses and zoocoenoses” [9]
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