International trends of rural landscape researches for land management and policies

Abstract

Rural landscapes have a long history of human impacts. The course of history was established by an interrelationship between nature and humans and rural landscape changes occur in the changing inter-relationship between them. In particular, changes in human impacts due to socio-economic changes have been the main driving force in the world since the industrial revolution. These have affected the rural ecosystem entity, such as by decreasing biodiversity, decreasing cultural diversity, destroying amenities, and so on. Theses changes have been occurring since about the 1950's in European countries, and they led to the start of landscape ecological studies on the effects of rural land use changes. In current, the same phenomenon has also occurred in East Asian countries. Therefore, landscape ecological studies of rural land use changes in European countries give a basic model of Asian rural landscape studies. Korea and Japan is examined as examples of rural landscape studies in East Asian countries. Finally, we believed that this paper is helpful in the understanding of land history and policy of East Asian rural landscapes. © 2007 Springer Netherlands.