The Role of Landscape Ecology in Development

Abstract

Landscape ecology is concerned with the interrelations between the Total Human Ecosystem—integrating natural ecosystems and human techno-ecosystems —and its concrete, spatial landscape units. It deals not only with natural and semi-natural landscapes but also with cultural–rural and urban–industrial landscapes and their inputs of fossil energy, artefacts, and cultural information and control. As an emerging branch of human ecosystem science with an interdisciplinary outlook on modern land-uses, it could play an important role in developing countries. Here, one of its greatest challenges is to find a compromise between the needs for conservation or reconstitution of open landscapes and the socio-economic needs of society. This can be achieved by transforming the noneconomic richness of the local ecosystem into workable parameters for the land-use planners and decisionmakers.As an example of such an attempt, the development and improvement of non-tillable Mediterranean uplands is presented by a model of multiple-use ecosystem management strategies and their benefits. Highest overall benefit for nature conservation, wildlife and recreation amenities, protection of environmental quality as well as livestock, forestry production, and water yields, can be expected by multiple-purpose reafforestation and revegetation.For the assessment of compatibility of these different land-use factors and their mutual influences, a cybernetic sensitivity model is proposed and the most active and critical variables—foresty, livestock production, and recreation—and the most passive one— water yields—are determined.In order to make possible cost-benefit analyses and achieve optimization for dynamic planning, these relative values should be replaced by actual quantitative ecological, economic, and socio-ecological, parameters —to be implemented on a national level as parts of comprehensive landscape master-plans.