Exploring the role of science in sustainable landscape management. An introduction to the special issue

Abstract

In this special issue, landscapes are conceptualized as social-ecological systems resulting from the interaction between societal and natural processes. Landscapes produce services and values to stakeholders that share a particular geographical area. In view of landscape sustainability, these stakeholders have common responsibilities to retain the functioning of landscapes to service future generations. Also, because demands for landscape services overlap and require landscape wide management, users and owners of the landscape have common interests in creating added value and organizing landscape wide coordination of interventions. This interdependency calls for collaborative management, but is also a cause of conflicts. From the point of view of scientific support, there is a need for interdisciplinary and solution-oriented approaches that foster collaboration. This special issue presents innovative interdisciplinary approaches that illustrate the main challenges for science to support community-based landscape governance.