Landscape concepts and approaches foster learning about ecosystem services

The ecosystem services framework aims to encourage ecological sustainability through political-economic decisions. However, it fails to capture the complexity of social–ecological interactions. This is an obstacle for coping with current grand challenges through integrative knowledge production and collaborative learning. Landscape concepts and approaches, which emphasize human–environment interactions, governance and stewardship, can help overcome this obstacle. In particular, landscape concepts and approaches can help resolve the integrative and operational gaps encountered in the ecosystem services framework as a means of communicating evidence-based knowledge about the state and trends of ecosystems. The goal of this Special Issue is to address how different interpretations of landscape can support knowledge production about ES, and how applying landscape approaches on the ground can encourage more collaborative and sustainable land management alternatives. The effectiveness of the ecosystem services framework can be improved by (1) the use of landscape concepts to build bridges to different disciplines, arts and practice, as well as to build SMART sustainability indicators, and (2) the application of holistic landscape approaches for place-based knowledge co-production and collaborative learning across multiple governance levels. This forms the base for a research infrastructure integrating methods from the natural and social sciences through macroecology, comparative politics, and regional studies. While place-based research using landscape concepts can help develop more sustainable alternatives for land management, scaling up landscape approach initiatives towards landscape stewardship and fostering collaborations among initiatives are paramount challenges.

PA acknowledges funding from EU Horizon 2020 for the research infrastructure project eLTER, the Swedish Research Council FORMAS (project number 2017:1342), the Lithuanian Science Council (project number P-MIP-17-107), and the 2018-19 Alter-Net High Impact Action. Additionally, funds have been provided by the PEGASUS (Grant agreement ID: 633814) and SUFISA (Grant Agreement: 635577) H2020 projects, and from the ICAAM-Universidade de de Évora annual funding program, including allowances for expenses, meetings and discussions. This work was also co-funded by National Funds through FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology-Portugal) under the project UID/AGR/00115/2019. We acknowledge constructive comments on the manuscript by I Aalders, N Fagerholm, A Rodriquez Sousa, M Spyra, A Vialatte, J Wu and C Quintas-Soriano.