Landscape ecology - the ecology of large heterogeneous areas, landscapes, regions, or simply of land mosaics, has rapidly emerged in the past decade as an important and useful tool for land-use planners and landscape architects. Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land-Use Planning is an essential handbook that presents and explains principles of landscape ecology and provides numerous examples of how those principles can be applied in specific situations.
This book is a major contribution to the debate on future land development strategies, as well as helping to supporting land use decision making at all levels. Scientists from across Europe installed the Landscape Tomorrow network to prepare for upcoming challenges in research on sustainable land development. The book’s interdisciplinary perspective analyses, among other things, the general principles of land use multifunctionality and reports on a variety of success stories.
Since the first publication of this landmark textbook in 2004, it has received high praise for its clear, comprehensive, and practical approach. The second edition continues to offer a unique framework for teaching and learning interdisciplinary environmental planning, incorporating the latest thinking, newest research findings, and numerous, updated case studies into the solid foundation of the first edition. This new edition highlights emerging topics such as sustainable communities, climate change, and international efforts toward sustainability. It has been reorganized based on feedback from instructors, and contains a new chapter entitled "Land Use, Energy, Air Quality and Climate Change." Throughout, boxes have been added on such topics as federal laws, state and local environmental programs, and critical problems and responses. With this thoroughly revised second edition, Environmental Land Use Planning and Management maintains its preeminence as the leading textbook in its field.
Human well-being depends in many ways on maintaining the stock of natural resources which deliver the services from which human’s benefit. However, these resources and flows of services are increasingly threatened by unsustainable and competing land uses. Particular threats exist to those public goods whose values are not well-represented in markets or whose deterioration will only affect future generations. As market forces alone are not sufficient, effective means for local and regional planning are needed in order to safeguard scarce natural resources, coordinate land uses and create sustainable landscape structures. This book argues that a solution to such challenges in Europe can be found by merging the landscape planning tradition with ecosystem services concepts. Landscape planning has strengths in recognition of public benefits and implementation mechanisms, while the ecosystem services approach makes the connection between the status of natural assets and human well-being more explicit. It can also provide an economic perspective, focused on individual preferences and benefits, which helps validate the acceptability of environmental planning goals. Thus linking landscape planning and ecosystem services provides a two-way benefit, creating a usable science to meet the needs of local and regional decision making. The book is structured around the Driving forces-Pressures-States-Impacts-Responses framework, providing an introduction to relevant concepts, methodologies and techniques. It presents a new, ecosystem services-informed, approach to landscape planning that constitutes both a framework and toolbox for students and practitioners to address the environmental and landscape challenges of 21st century Europe.
This reprint, originally published in 1983, draws attention to the important lines of thought that have emerged during the past several decades to offer a portrait of contemporary physical geography which have been drawn together in this text. It introduces conventional terms and topics of the subject and weaves them into a conceptual fabric that rests on three major themes, including the energy-balance concept; a model for understanding the forces and processes in the landscape; the stress-threshold concept; the relationship between the stress produced by forces such as wind and water and the resistance of the earth's materials; and the magnitude and frequency of change in the landscape. Chapter summaries are featured along with numerous illustrations.
The Living Landscape is a manifesto, resource, and textbook for architects, landscape architects, environmental planners, students, and others involved in creating human communities. Since its first edition, published in 1990, it has taught its readers how to develop new built environments while conserving natural resources. No other book presents such a comprehensive approach to planning that is rooted in ecology and design. And no other book offers a similar step-by-step method for planning with an emphasis on sustainable development. This second edition of The Living Landscape offers Frederick Steiner’s design-oriented ecological methods to a new generation of students and professionals. The Living Landscape offers • a systematic, highly practical approach to landscape planning that maximizes ecological objectives, community service, and citizen participation • more than 20 challenging case studies that demonstrate how problems were met and overcome, from rural America to large cities • scores of checklists and step-by-step guides • hands-on help with practical zoning, land use, and regulatory issues • coverage of major advances in GIS technology and global sustainability standards • more than 150 illustrations. As Steiner emphasizes throughout this book, all of us have a responsibility to the Earth and to our fellow residents on this planet to plan with vision. We are merely visiting this planet, he notes; we should leave good impressions.
Rapid changes in land use, especially in growing metropolitan areas, have created problems that increasingly indicate an urgent need for techniques and procedures for making intelligent land-use decisions. This book identifies the potential undesirable effects of land-use changes and provides techniques for estimating and minimizing them. Based on several years of research conducted by a team of thirty-four faculty and assistants, the study shows how planners and decision makers can benefit from such contemporary planning tools as remote sensing, statistical analysis, and computer technology, as well as a variety of evaluation procedures. Part 1 describes the problems of contemporary urbanization and offers a set of planning principles and tools for working with the environmental landscape. These principles and tools are the basis of the procedures detailed in Part 2; the assessment procedures, in turn, are an essential part of the two current planning approaches—the holistic, landscape approach and the parametric approach—described in Part 3.
This book reconciles competing and sometimes contradictory forms of land use, while also promoting sustainable land use options. It highlights land use planning, spatial planning, territorial (or regional) planning, and ecosystem-based or environmental land use planning as tools that strengthen land governance. Further, it demonstrates how to use these types of land-use planning to improve economic opportunities based on sustainable management of land resources, and to develop land use options that strike a balance between conservation and development objectives. Competition for land is increasing as demand for multiple land uses and ecosystem services rises. Food security issues, renewable energy and emerging carbon markets are creating pressures for the conversion of agricultural land to other uses such as reforestation and biofuels. At the same time, there is a growing demand for land in connection with urbanization and recreation, mining, food production, and biodiversity conservation. Managing the increasing competition between these services, and balancing different stakeholders’ interests, requires efficient allocation of land resources.
