Management of landscape services for improving community welfare in West Java, Indonesia

Abstract

A sustainable management of landscape services is needed to resolve ecological problems in rural and urban landscapes, particularly in developing countries, such as Indonesia. A specific management for particular area such as homegarden has to be developed in order to improve utilization of landscape services based on community activities. Four classic landscape services, i.e. biodiversity conservation, carbon stock and sequestration, water resources management, and landscape beautification are approached inside intensively managed homegarden. The landscape ecology approach was conducted through micro-, meso-, and macro-scales to figure out the potential ecology-economy-social benefit for urban-rural landscape inside homegarden as a small-scale agroforestry landscape or usually called as “pekarangan”. A well planned and managed agroforestry landscape practices may suppress social, economical and ecological condition in rural marginal society and would improve the community welfare. Therefore, by managing pekarangan systems for landscape services, marginal communities would have the possibility to advance their asset of landscape services through plant biodiversity (H’), carbon stock (C), water resources utilization, and scenic beauty inside pekarangan. The aims of this research are to develop basic landscape service of plant biodiversity, carbon stock, water management and landscape beautification and to arrange recommendation for revitalizing pekarangan. The results show that pekarangan has diverse plant biodiversity (0.77-3.57) and diverse carbon stock (0.13-136.20 Mg/ha). Pekarangan also has the ability to utilize water effectively and at the same time contribute to provide amenity from its beautification for human well-being. Those landscape services provided by pekarangan could directly and indirectly improves the community welfare.