A conceptual framework for integrated functional landscape monitoring in the wider countryside of central Europe

Abstract

Landscape monitoring is highly topical as we are faced again and again with challenges in the balance of nature and its utilisation. Knowing of this importance for the European Landscape Convention calls to support the landscape analyses for which suitable methods of international scale have to be developed. Landscape-related monitoring means, according to the authors, a trans-scale spatially nested and complex monitoring and evaluation of landscape change. Suitable methods were developed for the purpose and presented. The framework introduced has been tested successfully in three federal states of Germany since 1999 and may now be defined as being mature for application. As drawn up there are hypotheses, functions, indicators, and data to adapt to the spatial conception and the given conditions. The implementation of the various natural science and social science programmes which would require a high degree of compatibility for reason of their integrative properties represents a problem. They have to be implemented for entire project periods lasting for decades and implemented in continuous monitoring, the methodical consistency has to be assured, and a professional interpretation even of heterogeneous data and a reasonable, model-based forecast of the change of landscape have to be given. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.