ABSTRACT
The concept of ecosystems as providers of essential goods and services for the support of human well-being has become central to new perspectives about how ecosystems are valued and managed. These perspectives underlie justification for conservation in that ecosystem conservation is, so it is argued, necessary for continued delivery of ecosystem services, the multiple benefits that human societies and individuals receive from environment functions. Tropical landscape mosaics are sources of many goods and ecosystem services that society benefits from. A tropical landscape mosaic can be variously defined, but basically comprises a mix of forest patches (primary forest remnants, secondary forests or both), agricultural land managed by smallholders which can be agroforests, monoculture or a combination of these, and other landscape features such as urban and infrastructural developments or non-forest natural ecosystems. (Note that it is inappropriate in this context to define a “landscape” as a clearly delimited geographic area, because landscape mosaics reflect not only biophysical components, but also social, political and psychological attributes that people attach to them). Landscape mosaics provide services that include watershed protection, water quality and flow management, protection from hazards and extreme events, and recreation and aesthetic values at local scales and national scales, and biodiversity maintenance and carbon sequestration and storage at global scales. Landscape mosaics are also the source of a huge number of products that are traded regionally or globally. Most obviously, coffee, cocoa and rubber are three commodities with a huge export market that are mainly, or to a large extent, derived from smallholder farms located within landscape mosaics across the tropics. Other export commodities have considerable regional importance, such as flowers in Kenya, vegetables in China and apples in the Himalayan foothills.
