Daniela RIBEIRO, ZRC SAZU, Slovenia
Matej GABROVEC, ZRC SAZU, Slovenia
To meet growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel, humans have changed landscapes, over the last century, more rapidly and extensively than in any other time in human history. Land use changes have contributed to substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development. However, these gains have been achieved at a high cost in the terms of loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems.
Human induced changes in landscape are increasing the vulnerability of the Slovenian landscapes leading to on one hand, land abandonment in rural and marginal agricultural areas, and on the other to the agricultural intensification. These changes are compromising the harmonic proportions between cultivated land, settlements and forests, questioning not only the sustainability of present landscapes but also their long-term sustainability.
This research, taking place in Slovenia, aims to make landscape management operational and useful in the context of policy making for sustainable development. This placed-based research attempts to provide key content knowledge to bridge the science and the practice and enhancement of sustainable development, exploring case studies represented by Slovenian landscapes going through different transformations.
The overall procedure of the methodology included a 3-phase approach. The first phase aiming to understand the landscape structure and land use changes in relation to timeline, the phase 2 aiming to explore and designing landscape alternative scenarios, and the phase 3 to designing sustainable landscape management strategies for the landscapes selected.
Results expect to demonstrate how pattern-process dynamics interact with societal processes, to deliver collaborative decisions by local stakeholder groups, and to impact the scientific knowledge on local landscape policy and land use changes.
Mots clés : land use changes|ecosystem services|sustainable landscape management|optimization of spatial patterns|landscape scenarios
A104481DR