ABSTRACT
Introduction Human-induced land use changes can have major effects on landscape patterns and the functioning of the landscape, either through a complete change in land cover or through changes in the spatial configuration of the landscape. Land use changes are caused by a change in the demand for land-based commodities. Demand for land depends on market dynamics driven by anthropogenic or environmental processes, or can be induced by policy. Current research on land use change aims at predicting land-cover change in response to land use change, driven by global demographic and economical processes. Because land use and land cover are presumed to be related, we refer to this type of research as land use/cover modeling. Investigating land use/cover dynamics is of great potential interest to policy-makers because they can use the outcomes to design and finetune policies that aim at best uses of landscape resources. Specific tools to explore future scenarios of land use/cover change are used to assess impacts of this change and evaluate possible results of land use policies (Uran and Janssen 2003; Geertman and Stillwell 2004; McIntosh et al. 2007). Because land use changes are a result of different processes at different scales (Verburg and Chen 2000; Walsh et al. 2001; Bürgi et al. 2004), these land use/cover change tools should ideally be able to capture all important land use related processes at multiple scales. Changes in land cover and its composition and pattern can influence the functionality of the landscape (Metzger et al. 2006). With landscape functions, we refer to the capacity of the landscape to provide goods and services to society. These include goods such as harvested crops or timber, and services such as landscape aesthetics, provision of habitat or regulation of water systems. The capacity of a landscape to provide goods and services depends on socioeconomic and biophysical processes and components of the landscape, which include, among others, land cover (de Groot 1992). Landscape functions do not necessarily relate directly to land cover. Landscape functionality is defined by a number of characteristics, including a range of land cover types and their spatial configurations (Willemen et al. 2008). In many rural regions of Europe, landscapes provide more than one good or service at the same time, resulting in
multifunctional landscapes. A landscape could, for instance, facilitate recreational activities, be used for agricultural production, and provide habitat for meadow birds at the same time. Within such multifunctional landscapes, interactions like conflicts or synergies may occur between landscape functions. For example, intensive agriculture conflicts with suitability of land for habitat provision. Policy-makers are confronted with a demand for a broad range of landscape goods and services by society, but landscape function is currently not included in policy tools (Pinto-Correia et al. 2006; Vejre et al. 2007). Information on current landscape functions, the potential pressure on these functions, and the potential capacity of landscapes to function could all support land use planning. Current land use/cover models relate primarily to the classic spatial policy focus on agriculture and urban development. Because landscape functionality depends on land cover, results of large-scale land use/cover models could be used to explore the dynamics in landscape functionality. By using land use/cover model outputs, multi-scale processes can be taken into account when analyzing functionality on a landscape scale. The objective of this chapter is to illustrate how analyses of land use/cover and landscape functionality can be complementary. We argue that analysis on multiple scales is necessary to adequately address the complex structure of the land use system and illustrate how land use/cover changes can translate into impacts on landscape functionality. This chapter contains two sections. First, we identify possibilities and limitations to current land use/cover model outputs based on projected future changes in Europe. Second, a more detailed study in the Netherlands is presented to identify landscape functionality and to address possible effects of land use/cover changes on landscape functionality.
