Janet Silbernagel

Linking ecosystem services with landscape history

The concept of ecosystem services (ES) has become widely used because it bridges ecology and economics and links nature to society. ES may evolve over time in dynamic landscapes driven by myriad processes. However, the consequences of changes in key ES has not been considered adequately in current ES research. Here we propose a framework for linking ES with landscape history, which can help us better understand the evolution of ES over time. We illustrate the framework by a case study from Switzerland. Both the capacity of landscapes to supply ES and the realization and recognition of key ES are likely to change over time. This insight should have important implications for landscape sustainability and related scenario studies.

The social and spatial dynamics of community food production: a landscape approach to policy and program development

Community food production in the form of home gardening, community gardening, school gardening, and urban farming continues to increase in popularity in many parts of the world. This interest has led to public and private investment in community food production and increased need for urban agricultural planning as a way to manage growth and prioritize resource allocation. Municipal planning and thoughtful institutional support for the practice will require program evaluation and greater attention to the spatial composition and configuration of this widely dispersed practice. This article explores the results of community-supported landscape socio-ecological research in Madison, WI (USA) to assess the spatial and social dynamics of community food production. Results indicate that community food production resources are unevenly distributed across the study area. Historic community garden placement does appear to be consistent with community prioritization which dictates placing resources in areas with low median household income. However, home garden presence and recent community garden placement both occur in areas of higher than average median household income. Specific focus is placed on how an understanding of landscape placement and pattern has helped inform attempts to meet municipal and regional objectives in addressing urban food insecurity.

Modeling canopy openness and understory gap patterns based on image analysis and mapped tree data

Ecological relationships beneath a forest canopy are related spatially to the pattern of canopy gaps and sunlight penetration. Methods to characterize and predict canopy light patterns from easily gathered site inventory data are not readily available. We developed a model to estimate the proportion and distribution of canopy openings visible from the under-story, in lieu of hemispherical photography or field instrumentation. An automated procedure for constructing vertical wide-angle views of forest canopies using standard computer-aided design (CAD) software was applied to canopy structure data collected on individual mapped trees in old-growth plots. Vertical hemispherical photos of actual canopies were paired with constructed CAD views of the same point to evaluate the correspondence between the two. Using image analysis software, we assessed total canopy openness (CO) and largest gap size (GAP) on 324 image pairs from seven different plots. With the exception of one plot, a single quadratic model form fit the remaining observations, resulting in r2 values over 50% between CAD and photo images. We could not adequately model a plot with heavy non-tree understory vegetation. We also compared contour maps of CO gradients from the CAD images and estimates from the regression model to the photographic images to evaluate whether spatial distributions of canopy openings were correctly captured by the constructed model approach. Visual observations of the gradient map show peaks and valleys in canopy openness that visually match openness on photos at corresponding locations in the plot. Lastly, we found a relatively stable correspondence in the distribution of gap sizes between photographic and CAD images. The models presented here may be applied to known or simulated patterns of tree data to derive a spatially-explicit estimation of gap patterns without the need for corresponding photography or instrumentation.

Collaborative scenario modeling reveals potential advantages of blending strategies to achieve conservation goals in a working forest landscape

ContextBroad-scale land conservation and management often involve applying multiple strategies in a single landscape. However, the potential outcomes of such arrangements remain difficult to evaluate given the interactions of ecosystem dynamics, resource extraction, and natural disturbances. The costs and potential risks of implementing these strategies make robust evaluation critical.ObjectivesWe used collaborative scenario modeling to compare the potential outcomes of alternative management strategies in the Two Hearted River watershed in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to answer key questions: Which management strategies best achieve conservation goals of maintaining landscape spatial heterogeneity and conserving mature forests and wetlands? And how does an increase in wildfire and windthrow disturbances influence these outcomes?MethodsScenarios were modeled using the VDDT/TELSA state-and-transition modeling suite, and resulting land cover maps were analyzed using ArcGIS, FRAGSTATS, and R statistical software.ResultsResults indicate that blending conservation strategies, such as single-ownership forest reserves and working forest conservation easements in targeted areas of the landscape, may better achieve these goals than applying a single strategy across the same area. However, strategies that best achieve these conservation goals may increase the sensitivity of the landscape to changes in wildfire and windthrow disturbance regimes.ConclusionsThese results inform decision-making about which conservation strategy or combination of strategies to apply in specific locations on the landscape to achieve optimum conservation outcomes, how to best utilize scarce financial resources, and how to reduce the financial and ecological risks associated with the application of innovative strategies in an uncertain future.

The Next Frontier: Projecting the Effectiveness of Broad-scale Forest Conservation Strategies

Conservation and land management organizations such as The Nature Conservancy are developing conservation strategies to distribute protection efforts over larger areas and a broader range of ownership and management techniques. These “distributed conservation strategies,” such as working forest conservation easements, are based on the premise that blending resource extraction, such sustainable timber harvest, and conservation should yield greater socio-economic benefits without significantly compromising the conservation of biodiversity or the sustainable provisioning of ecosystem services. However, it is unknown how well these strategies will compare to traditional conservation preserves or if they will be robust to climate change and resource demand over the coming centuries. Due to scarce financial resources and the relative difficulty of negotiating easement acquisitions, it is important for forest conservation and management organizations to know which strategies most effectively meet conservation goals. Meanwhile, the long duration required to evaluate most monitoring questions leads to a lag in knowledge transfer and delayed adaptive management. In this chapter, we discuss the challenges and constraints to measuring conservation effectiveness and illustrate a scenario-building approach that we are applying to understand and compare the conservation effectiveness of various conservation strategies in two large conservation acquisitions in the Great Lakes region of the United States. We show how this approach can be used to evaluate potential outcomes for biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services resulting from varying conservation strategies and discuss implications of this approach for the future of forest conservation.

Biodiversity Conservation Planning in Rural Landscapes in Japan: Integration of Ecological and Visual Perspectives

Conservationists worldwide have long been interested in rural landscapes (McNeely & Keeton, 1995; McNeely, 1995; Miller & Hobbs, 2002; Washitani, 2001; Yokohari et al., 2005), which can be characterized as semi-natural areas that are neither pristinely natural nor urban, maintained by appropriate level of human interventions. A great portion of the world’s biodiversity is found in these landscapes (Pimentel et al., 1992). Such landscapes have gained an international attention as Satoyama, and an international partnership has been established in 2010 to promote sustainable use of human-influenced natural environment through the Satoyama Initiative (Convention on Biological Diversity Decision X/32). Japanese archipelago is one of the 34 Biodiversity Hotspots of the world (Mittermeier et al., 2004), and its biodiversity owe much to the quality of the human-influenced natural environment. Rural landscapes are an important conservation challenge in Japan because they are being lost rapidly. The challenge is that the traditional conservation strategy of “setting aside” will not work because humans play important roles in maintaining biodiversity on such landscapes (e.g., Farina, 1995; McNeely, 1995; Melnick, 1983; Nakagoshi, 1995; Natori et al., 2005; Washitani, 2001). Conservation in rural environments faces difficulties also because the public tends to associate nature conservation with pristine, untouched nature (Miller & Hobbs, 2002). The conservation of rural environments would require approaches different from the traditional conservation strategies employed for pristine natural areas. Many have suggested that the consideration of the sociocultural dimension is crucial to the success of the conservation of rural environments in particular, and the conservation of biodiversity in general (e.g., Miller & Hobbs, 2002; Phillips, 1995; Pimentel et al., 1992; Saunders, 1990; Yokohari et al., 1994). Naveh (2000; 2001) has explicitly included humans in his theoretical development of a holistic approach to landscape studies. Born and Sonzogni (1995) and Margerum and Born (1995) have articulated a more pragmatic means to deal with environmental problems in the framework of integrated environmental management. Trauger (1999) calls for a shift from a traditional discipline-based approach to a problembased approach. Accordingly, transdisciplinary research is being advocated in recent years

Foraging Success and Habitat Selection of the Eurasian Spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia) at Poyang Lake, China

Abstract.— Poyang Lake is Chinas largest freshwater lake in summer and provides important habitat for an internationally significant assemblage of waterbirds in winter. Human-caused alterations to this system threaten to compromise the long-term viability of these bird populations due to the role of water in driving habitat suitability. Little is known, however, about the patch-scale habitat selection strategies of waterbirds within Poyang. Consequently, there is potential for spatial incongruence between protected area boundaries and key habitats given the systems high variability. This study used scan and focal sampling techniques to investigate patch selection by a wintering population of the Eurasian Spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia) within the Sha Hu sub-lake basin of Poyang Lake. Eurasian Spoonbills averaged higher foraging success rates in areas with water depth of 28.1-36.6 cm compared to other areas and preferred to forage in this depth class, as indicated by usage disproportionate to availability (Manlys standardized selection index = 0.817). Defining the patch-scale habitat selection of this indicator species both quantifies the impact of hydrological changes on resource availability and spatially predicts suitable areas for wintering birdlife within a dynamic environment.

Participatory mobile- and web-based tools for eliciting landscape knowledge and perspectives: introducing and evaluating the Wisconsin geotools project

Despite synergistic goals across a wide breadth of fields and modalities, coastal landscape conservation projects that engage the lay public and integrate narratives of place remain elusive. This paper addresses these needs by introducing and evaluating the Wisconsin Geotools, an integrated pair of mobile-and web-based applications that allow users to generate and share spatially defined multimedia observations — including photos, short textual descriptions (or journals), and audio and video clips — of their surrounding bioregional landscapes. We followed a participatory, user-centered design process to develop a mobile application that uses GPS capabilities to geolocate multimedia observations of landscapes and feed them into a web-based application, which displays content through the structure of an interactive story map. The applications were piloted with coastal community user groups in Green Bay (Lake Michigan), Wisconsin, USA. Over 800 observations were recorded by participants in our study area. Results from a user evaluation survey indicate the geotools effectively engaged participants in learning about and exploring their surrounding coastal landscapes. A spatial analysis revealed participants’ affinity for water-related features in landscapes. We close by suggesting a variety of ways in which these tools can support future projects and existing methodologies that are advancing transdisciplinary approaches to engaging the public in coastal conservation.

Landscape ecology in Asian cultures: a book review

‘‘During the two decades of the 1980 and 1990 s, landscape ecology swept through North America like a storm, was rejuvenated in Europe, and reached out to other parts of the world, including Asia and Australia,’’ (Wu, chapter 20). This book captures the current scope and essence of landscape ecological work across Asia, demonstrating the keen interest in understanding the unique characteristics of Asian cultural landscapes and in applying concepts of landscape ecology to planning and sustainability across diverse countries. Landscape ecology in Asian cultures is an edited compilation of 20 chapters organized into three parts. Part I, ‘‘Understanding Asian cultural landscapes,’’ offers a set of descriptive characterizations of 10 different cultural landscapes in Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Iran, Indonesia, and China. The authors describe human influences on vegetation and landscape change, the often long-standing human-nature practices and conflicts, as well as the significance of some as traditional and sacred landscapes. Some chapters focus on pragmatic applications of landscape ecological and cultural analysis, such as the potential for ecotourism development in Korea’s island and coastal communities (Hong, chapter 2), and the trade-offs between agriculture, tourism, and conservation in East Java (Hakim, chapter 6). Other chapters are devoted to understanding the varied histories and deep-seated traditions of particular landscapes across Asia. For example, Yumoto (chapter 1) provides historical perspectives on human-nature interactions in the Japanese archipelago, while Jiao and Li (chapter 3) analyze harmony and conflicts between Hani culture and nature using field surveys. Still others define and describe sacred landscapes at a variety of locations, including ‘geocultural’ sites in Iran (Azari-Dehkordi, chapter 5), the traditional forests of Korea (Hong and Kim, chapter 7), and finally the rich tradition of Chobun, or double-burial, and its relation to landscape impacts in Korea’s Haui Island (Park, chapter 8). Part II, ‘‘Measuring and managing patterns and process of cultural landscapes,’’ provides a series of nine different quantitative applications of landscape ecological science to examine the unique patterns and processes of Asian landscapes. For example, chapter 11 (Bogaert et al.) proposes a methodological framework to quantify anthropogenic change and provides a set of tools or indices to best capture this change. Others apply foundational landscape ecological tools (e.g. Fragstats) to analyze factors affecting landscape change at multiple scales on the islands of Japan (Ohta and Nakagoshi, chapter 12) and the attributes of aquatic landscapes affecting bird diversity in Taiwan (Fang, chapter 13). Some discuss more novel approaches, such as a combined 3D photographic and GIS analysis for scenic assessment in Japan (Yamashita, chapter 14). However, few of these J. Silbernagel (&) Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 535706, USA e-mail: jmsilber@wisc.edu

Joan Iverson Nassauer, Mary V. Santelmann, and Donald Scavia (eds.): From the Corn Belt to the Gulf: Societal and Environmental Implications of Alternative Agricultural Futures

The northern Gulf of Mexico has a zone of hypoxia (the dead zone) that the US EPA estimated to cover 20,000 km in 2001, with goals to reduce its size to below 5,000 km. Shrinking the area of hypoxia in the Gulf requires consideration of the entire Mississippi River Basin (MRB), and the influence of agricultural policy in the Corn Belt. Policy in the Corn Belt states—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin—can influence farm practices that contribute nutrient loading to the Gulf and other environmental and societal impacts throughout the Basin. From the Corn Belt to the Gulf synthesizes two sets of scientific integrated assessments (IAs) to evaluate environmental and societal effects of future landscape changes that could result from agricultural policies. The two IAs are nested in scale: two small second order Iowa watersheds in the Corn Belt region lie within the central reaches of the entire MRB flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. The finer scale Corn Belt assessment was driven by prospective normative scenarios and modeling of alternative landscape futures for the Iowa study watersheds, whereas the broader scale MRB assessment was based on evaluation of predictive scenarios. The two studies were completed independently with the MRB IA conducted first (CENR 2000), followed by the Corn Belt IAs a few years hence (Nassauer and Corry 2004). Thus the book represents a series of research papers for each of the two assessments that for the most part, could stand on their own, but were brought together in this book to emphasize the connection between farm level decisions on the ground, and regional implications for health of the Gulf. Together they attempt to link sound science on causes of the dead zone with alternative future scenarios for agriculture in the Corn Belt, and offer new insight for policy at both scales. In each chapter the authors draw on multi-disciplinary experts and/or stakeholders to provide quantitative measures of environmental and societal effects of future landscape change that could result from agricultural policy. The editors bring out public concerns about environmental health and farmers’ perceptions of agricultural futures as important elements to this synthesis. The book is organized into three parts. Following an introductory chapter that explains the approaches used here and how they can inform agricultural policy, Part 1 examines the drivers of landscape futures at the broadest scales, including a scientific discussion of hypoxia and water quality in the MRB (Turner et al.), as well as an examination of changing public expectations to federal agricultural policies such as the Conservation Reserve Program (Nassauer and Kling). Part 2 is focused on the Corn Belt IA, assessing the baseline and three agricultural policy scenarios, their potential landscape futures, and likely environmental J. Silbernagel (&) Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA e-mail: jmsilber@wisc.edu