ABSTRACT
Over a period of time people have lived in and with their surrounding landscapes and for several thousand years transformed the soilscapes and the vegetation into cultural landscape types important for their economy and to meet their needs (Richter 2007, Ellis 2011, Hjelle 2012). The sustainable provision of goods and services depends critically on managing soils without damaging the natural soilscapes and the related natural resources. To support the transition towards sustainable development, science needs to understand how land-use change affects the environment and how this, in turn, feeds back into human livelihood strategies or infl uences the vulnerability of the environment (Rounsevell et al. 2012a). Interactions between decision-making, governance structures, production and consumption, technology, ecosystem services and global environmental change infl uence human activities at the local and regional
Dipartimento di Scienze Agrarie e Forestali, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, 13, 90128-Palermo (Italy). aE-mail: giuseppe.lopapa@unipa.it bE-mail: carmelo.dazzi@unipa.it *Corresponding author
scale, and are infl uenced by and feed back to the global scale, thereby shaping trajectories of human-environment interaction in land systems (Lambin and Meyfroidt 2011).
