Land

Landscapes and regions are where many natural processes and human activities interact and potentially conflict in different ways, giving complex challenges for sustainable management.

Landscapes and regions are where many natural processes and human activities interact and potentially conflict in different ways, giving complex challenges for sustainable management.

Managing landscapes has to satisfy multiple purposes and has to account for multiple time and spatial scales. Landscapes are open systems and therefore the exchange of nutrients, matter and individuals need to be understood in their spatial and time context.

To understand the relationships between ecosystem function and structure and how this leads to the services provided to society, we adopt a multi-scale perspective, ranging from field to continent, depending on the particular case.

This often implies studying and managing landscapes across management units and property boundaries. We integrate multiple disciplines in the natural and social sciences to study socio-ecological systems, giving the human and natural component equal importance to understand the past and future trajectories of change, examine trade-offs and policy options.

Landscapes are dynamic and complex. The nature of their change is inherently uncertain and so can be the outcome of policy interventions. We facilitate approaches to management that involve policy makers, land managers, communities and civil society and permit experimentation, participation and collective learning by all parties involved in this process.

Our current research includes the following.

• Quantifying the spatial distribution of land functions and ecosystem services.
• Understanding the natural and land use factors that influence the distribution of species and habitats at the field, catchment, national, and continental level.
• Modelling the direct and indirect effects of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
• Developing satellite-based indicators of the effects of climate change.
• Understanding trade-offs between different land functions and services at multiple scales.
• Examining how to upscale conservation policy objectives from individual site to landscapes and regions.
• Examining the implication of trade-offs for different policy options to help society adapt to climate change.
• Developing new theoretical frameworks for decision-making and new informatics tools to help participation in the resolution of conflicts between different uses of the land.
• Developing new dynamic tools to examine scenarios of environmental change and their effect on natural capital.
• Providing supporting evidence for the formulation of national scale land related policies. More information is available on our Land Systems Research [1] page.

Outputs from our work on land can be found on our Research Outputs page [2].