Landscapes and sustainabilty

I always have been interested in landscapes. When I was a boy, one of my favorites was the Upper Engadine Valley.

Later, three trips have marked me a lot: (1) the National Parks in the U.S, in 1974, which has many nice landscapes but separated by huge distances, (2) the Nepal Himalaya in the Pokhara area in 1975 with its terraces and the snow covered Annapurna Massive behind and (3) the trip to eastern Europe (Eastern Germany, Poland and Latvia) in 1999 with its flat sand-dominated landscape (photo of the Land Brandenburg in the Berlin area, source: http://www.reiseland-brandenburg.de/themen/natur/nationale-naturlandschaften/naturpark-stechlin-ruppiner-land.html).

Switzerland is well-known for its different lake- and mountain-dominated landscapes, separated by relatively short distances and it is base of tourism. The rapidly growing economy and population, in the last years, have put these nice sceneries under pressure (urbanization) to the point that tourists may want to pass their vacation at places where nature is better preserved and local people cannot afford anymore to live in the villages, because of very high land prices (photo Zermatt area, source: www.nzz.ch)

 

The reason why I bring up this subject, is that I recently ran accross several interesting publications on the subject, published by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), the Federal Office for spatial development (ARE) and the Swiss Foundation for Landscape Conservation (SL). 

The FOEN had published several interesting visions in 2003, entitled "Landscape 2020". In 2011 the ARE published maps of Switzerland, sudivided in 38 types of landscapes, mainly based on geomorphological (Jura, Middle Land, Alps; plains, valleys, hills, mountains etc.) and geological criteria (carbonate, silicate rocks):

However as the following legends show, it is a rather complicated classification, which emphasizes altitude and slope angles too much instead of land use/cover (forest, agricultural plots, lakes etc.):

 

The approach chosen by the SL (unfortunatley only  available in German) is much more attractive and is based on the concept of "cultural landscapes", based on the 6 main landscape elements ("textures") which dominate a given landscape: forest, type of agriculture, water, habitat, infrastructure and patrimony,  providing the four important ecosystem services (cultural, natural, identification/ patrimony-creating, recreating). 

For each of these 6 main categories, up to 6 subtypes are presented, e.g. for the habitat:  landscape with scattered settlements, village-dominated landscapes, periurban, suburban and urban landscapes, resulting also in 39 subtypes. But this classification takes important and obvious landscape elements such us rivers, lakes, hedges (German "Hecken") or parkways (allees) much better into account than the ARE classification:

In 2005 the government of the French province Rhône-Alpes had published a similar approach to the one of the SL, coming up just with 7 landscape types, plus a lake category:

Here are these 7 types:

All of the agencies that published these different approaches underline their usefulness for planning and sustainable development. Especially the SL emphasizes an important aspect: often the general aims and the specific aspects to protect, when a given cultural landscape is included in an inventory such as Unesco heritage or is declared protected by a local government, are not well defined. Being able to recognize important landscape elements and their ecosystem service is thus primordial (cf. article "The Concept of Ecosystem Services Regarding Landscape Research: A Review" by Hermann et al., Living Rev. Landscape Res., 5, 2011, 1).