The erosion of relational values resulting from landscape simplification

Context The global trend of landscape simplification for industrial agriculture is known to cause losses in biodiversity and ecosystem service diversity. Despite these problems being widely known, status quo trajectories driven by global economic growth and changing diets continue to lead to further landscape simplification. Objectives In this perspective article, we argue that landscape simplification has negative consequences for a range of relational values, affecting the social-ecological relationships between people and nature, as well as the social relationships among people. A focus on relational values has been proposed to overcome the divide between intrinsic and instrumental values that people gain from nature. Results We use a landscape sustainability science framing to examine the interconnections between ecological and social changes taking place in rural landscapes. We propose that increasingly rapid and extreme landscape simplification erodes human-nature connectedness, social relations, and the sense of agency of inhabitants—potentially to the point of severe erosion of relational values in extreme cases. We illustrate these hypothesized changes through four case studies from across the globe. Leaving the links between ecological, social-ecological and social dimensions of landscape change unattended could exacerbate disconnection from nature. Conclusion A relational values perspective can shed new light on managing and restoring landscapes. Landscape sustainability science is ideally placed as an integrative space that can connect relevant insights from landscape ecology and work on relational values. We see local agency as a likely key ingredient to landscape sustainability that should be actively fostered in conservation and restoration projects.

Integrating GeoDesign with Landscape Sustainability Science

With an increasing world population and accelerated urbanization, the development of landscape sustainability remains a challenge for scientists, designers, and multiple stakeholders. Landscape sustainability science (LSS) studies dynamic relationships among landscape pattern, ecosystem services, and human well-being with spatially explicit methods. The design of a sustainable landscape needs both landscape sustainability–related disciplines and digital technologies that have been rapidly developing. GeoDesign is a new design method based on a new generation of information technology, especially spatial information technology, to design land systems. This paper discusses the suitability of GeoDesign for LSS to help design sustainable landscapes. Building on a review of LSS and GeoDesign, we conclude that LSS can utilize GeoDesign as a research method and the designed landscape as a research object to enrich and empower the spatially explicit methodology of LSS. To move forward, we suggest to integrate GeoDesign with LSS from six perspectives: strong/weak sustainability, multiple scales, ecosystem services, sustainability indicators, big data application, and the sense of place. Toward this end, we propose a LSS-based GeoDesign framework that links the six perspectives. We expect that this integration between GeoDesign and LSS will help advance the science and practice of sustainability and bring together many disciplines across natural, social, and design sciences.