Landscape is central to tourism. It is key to the development, marketing/promotion, and consumption of tourism destinations, to triggering and sustaining tourism markets, and to enticing tourist ...dreams, fantasies, and behaviors. From ‘sight-seeing’ practices—at the basis of all tourism activities—landscape figures prominently all the way to the overall spatial planning and management of a destination for tourism development. The intertwined relationship between tourism and landscape comes with a series of costs and benefits, in the context of tourism landscapes. Landscapes of tourism reflect and stage recreational trends, multifunctional livelihood systems, conflicts and opportunities for employment and income generation, as well as human, cultural, and natural resource management and use. This Special Issue aims to enhance the interdisciplinary scientific dialogue on these issues and challenges, while highlighting their range and significance for tourism and the landscape, in terms of theory, empirical practice, approach, policy, ethics, and future prospects. Some of the questions posed for consideration here are: What are landscapes of tourism, for whom and how/why? What is the role of the landscape in tourism promotion, attraction, and experience? How does tourism affect the landscape? What lessons do the history and geography of tourism have to offer to tourism landscape stewardship? How may we best plan for and manage the landscape in the context of various forms of tourism growth and spread, at various scales? Scholarly advances in the past few decades have steadily built on a diverse—but spread-out and not adequately connected—bibliographical basis for future research. Much remains to be understood and exchanged as landscape and tourism—two highly complex and multifaceted scientific areas—come together in the scope of this Special Issue in a variety of ways across time, space, and culture.
It has become conventional to think of urbanism and landscape as opposing one another—or to think of landscape as merely providing temporary relief from urban life as shaped by buildings and ...infrastructure. But, driven in part by environmental concerns, landscape has recently emerged as a model and medium for the city, with some theorists arguing that landscape architects are the urbanists of our age. In Landscape as Urbanism, one of the field's pioneers presents a powerful case for rethinking the city through landscape. Charles Waldheim traces the roots of landscape as a form of urbanism from its origins in the Renaissance through the twentieth century. Growing out of progressive architectural culture and populist environmentalism, the concept was further informed by the nineteenth-century invention of landscape architecture as a "new art" charged with reconciling the design of the industrial city with its ecological and social conditions. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as urban planning shifted from design to social science, and as urban design committed to neotraditional models of town planning, landscape urbanism emerged to fill a void at the heart of the contemporary urban project. Generously illustrated, Landscape as Urbanism examines works from around the world by designers ranging from Ludwig Hilberseimer, Andrea Branzi, and Frank Lloyd Wright to James Corner, Adriaan Geuze, and Michael Van Valkenburgh. The result is the definitive account of an emerging field that is likely to influence the design of cities for decades to come.
Quantifying landscape characteristics and linking them to ecological processes is one of the central goals of landscape ecology. Landscape metrics are a widely used tool for the analysis of ...patch‐based, discrete land‐cover classes. Existing software to calculate landscape metrics has several constraints, such as being limited to a single platform, not being open‐source or involving a complicated integration into large workflows. We present landscapemetrics, an open‐source R package that overcomes many constraints of existing landscape metric software. The package includes an extensive collection of commonly used landscape metrics in a tidy workflow. To facilitate the integration into large workflows, landscapemetrics is based on a well‐established spatial framework in R. This allows pre‐processing of land‐cover maps or further statistical analysis without importing and exporting the data from and to different software environments. Additionally, the package provides many utility functions to visualize, extract, and sample landscape metrics. Lastly, we provide building‐blocks to motivate the development and integration of new metrics in the future. We demonstrate the usage and advantages of landscapemetrics by analysing the influence of different sampling schemes on the estimation of landscape metrics. In so doing, we demonstrate the many advantages of the package, especially its easy integration into large workflows. These new developments should help with the integration of landscape analysis in ecological research, given that ecologists are increasingly using R for the statistical analysis, modelling and visualization of spatial data.
•Multi-landscape study of effects of farmland pattern on biodiversity in crop fields.•Seven taxa studied – birds, plants, butterflies, bees, syrphids, carabids and spiders.•Diversity and abundance of ...all taxa decline with increasing mean field size.•Field size effect is stronger than effect of area under cultivation.
Simple rules for landscape management seem elusive because different species and species groups are associated with different land cover types; a change in landscape structure that increases diversity of one group may reduce diversity of another. On the other hand, if simple landscape–biodiversity relationships do exist despite this complexity, they would have great practical benefit to conservation management. With these considerations in mind, we tested for consistent relationships between landscape heterogeneity and biodiversity in farmland (the cropped areas in agricultural landscapes), with a view to developing simple rules for landscape management that could increase biodiversity within farmland. Our measures of farmland heterogeneity were crop diversity and mean crop field size, where increases in crop diversity and/or decreases in mean field size represent increasing landscape heterogeneity. We sampled the abundance, and alpha, gamma and beta diversity of birds, plants, butterflies, syrphids, bees, carabids and spiders, in crop fields within each of 93 1km×1km agricultural landscapes. The landscapes were selected to represent three gradients in landscape composition and heterogeneity: proportion of the landscape in crop, mean crop field size and Shannon crop type diversity of the farmland. We found that mean crop field size had the strongest overall effect on biodiversity measures in crop fields, and this effect was consistently negative. Based on our results we suggest that, if biodiversity conservation in crop fields is a priority, policies and guidelines aimed at reducing crop field sizes should be considered.
•We present a landscape characterization based on three dimensions of rural cultural landscapes.•Landscapes are categorized using maps of landscape structure, management intensity, and landscape ...value and meaning.•We map distinct spatial patterns of cultural landscapes across Europe.•Hotspots of cultural landscapes were mainly found in the Mediterranean.
Almost all rural areas in Europe have been shaped or altered by humans and can be considered cultural landscapes, many of which now are considered to entail valuable cultural heritage. Current dynamics in land management have put cultural landscapes under a huge pressure of agricultural intensification and land abandonment. To prevent the loss of cultural landscapes, knowledge on the location of different types of cultural landscapes is needed. In this paper, we present a characterization of European cultural landscapes based on the prevalence of three key dimensions of cultural landscapes: landscape structure, management intensity, and value and meaning. We mapped these dimensions across Europe at a 1-km resolution by combining proxies on management intensity and landscape structure with new indicators such as social media usage and registered traditional food products. We integrated the three dimensions into a continuous “cultural landscape index” that allows for a characterization of Europe’s rural landscapes. The characterization identifies hotspots of cultural landscapes, where all three dimensions are present, such as in the Mediterranean. On the other hand, Eastern and Northern European cultural landscapes are mostly characterized by only one of the dimensions. Our paper can help to identify pressures to cultural landscapes and thus to target measures for the conservation of these landscapes, to link similar landscapes in different regions, and to inform policy design on the most important characteristics of cultural landscapes at a regional scale.
Context
The karst region of southwestern China, one of the largest continuous karsts in the world, is known for its unique landscapes and rich biodiversity. This region has suffered severe ...environmental degradation (e.g., vegetation cover loss, soil erosion and biodiversity loss). In recent decades, Chinese governments at different levels have initiated several ecological programs (e.g., Green for Grain, Mountain Closure) to restore the degraded environment and to alleviate poverty.
Objectives
This study summarizes landscape studies of karst landscapes patterns, their dynamics and interactions among landscape pattern, hydrological processes and ecosystem services (ES).
Methods
We conducted a systematic literature review of science and land use policy to identify knowledge gaps and recommend future research and policy directions.
Results
Karst landscapes have experienced rapid turnover in recent decades due largely to the overlap of intense human activity on the fragile karst ecosystems. Many studies have comprehensively examined hydrology, soil processes and ecosystem services (ES) and their relationships with landscape pattern. Most of these studies have found that karst ecosystems recover with improved ES. However, the importance of epikarst in hydrological and soil processes, intense anthropogenic disturbance and landscape heterogeneity in landscape models remains elusive.
Conclusions
Future research should focus on in-depth examination and modelling of karst specific hydrological and soil processes, investigating relationships between climatic change, landscape change, ecological processes, and region-specific ES assessments. Results from such research should provide the necessary scientific support for a comprehensive, national karst rocky desertification treatment project (Stage II) and poverty alleviation initiatives.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Citation: Matias MG, Coleman RA, Hochuli DF, Underwood AJ (2013) ...Correction: Macrofaunal Responses to Edges Are Independent of Habitat-Heterogeneity in Experimental Landscapes.
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