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Coastal zones are key interconnectors of terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Due to the degradation and fragmentation of coastal wetlands, there is an urgent need to develop assessment methodology to compare the health of wetland ecosystems at different spatial scales. This will help efficiently develop and implement protections using easy-to-access ecosystem health data. This study aims to understand the spatial distribution of coastal and inland wetland health for China’s coastal regions. A Wetland Health Index (WHI) was developed to provide a basis for policy and decision making. Four utilization models—Long Term Model, Open Model, Nature Reserve Model, and Protected and Economic Model—were defined in the context of China’s coastal regions to specifically examine wetland health. Results show that the average WHI score was 63.6 with the range of 44.8–84.3 for 35 National Nature Reserves (NNRs), and the southern NNRs generally performed better than the northern NNRs. The wetlands in the southern provinces/municipalities are relatively healthier than their northern counterparts. The competent authority has slight influence on WHI scores but duration of conservation establishment does not show a clear correlation. With increasing economic activity, the differences in health conditions (WHI scores) of China’s coastal regions also increase. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or economic intensification does not relate to WHI scores. Appropriate trade-offs between wetland management and economic development could contribute to improve health conditions, conservation and utilization of coastal and inland wetlands.

Resource recovery and reuse from domestic wastewater has become an important subject for the current development of sanitation technologies and infrastructures. Different technologies are available and combined into sanitation concepts, with different performances. This study provides a methodological approach to evaluate the sustainability of these sanitation concepts with focus on resource recovery and reuse. St. Eustatius, a small tropical island in the Caribbean, was used as a case study for the evaluation. Three source separation-community-on-site and two combined sewerage island-scale concepts were selected and compared in terms of environmental (net energy use, nutrient recovery/reuse, BOD/COD, pathogens, and GHG emission, land use), economic (CAPEX and OPEX), social cultural (acceptance, required competences and education), and technological (flexibility/adaptability, reliability/continuity of service) indicators. The best performing concept, is the application of Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Bed (UASB) and Trickling Filter (TF) at island level for combined domestic wastewater treatment with subsequent reuse in agriculture. Its overall average normalised score across the four categories (i.e., average of average per category) is about 15% (0.85) higher than the values of the remaining systems and with a score of 0.73 (conventional activated sludge – centralised level), 0.77 (UASB-septic tank (ST)), 0.76 (UASB-TF - community level), and 0.75 (ST - household level). The higher score of the UASB-TF at community level is mainly due to much better performance in the environmental and economic categories. In conclusion, the case study provides a methodological approach that can support urban planning and decision-making in selecting more sustainable sanitation concepts, allowing resource recovery and reuse in small island context or in other contexts.

Food’s place on the urban, municipal agenda has become an increasing focus in the emergent fields of food policy and food planning, whose leaders argue that food needs to be more explicitly added to the urban agenda. Yet, public food markets are a food system activity that municipal governments have been long engaged in. Reports from leading health, planning, and food organizations assert that farmers markets—the dominant form of public retail food markets in the US today—should be explicitly included in zoning and other municipal codes to ensure that they can be created and sustained. Despite their popularity as a local sustainable food system and healthy food access strategy, it is unclear whether markets have been codified through municipalities’ planning and policy instruments, and research has largely not addressed this topic. This study aims to elicit whether markets have been codified into law, focusing on US municipal charters, codes and zoning ordinances, using Michigan, an upper Midwest state, as a case. After analyzing municipal documents to determine whether and where markets have been codified into law in ninety Michigan cities, this study concludes that markets are highly underrepresented in municipal policy, rarely defined in code, and mostly absent from zoning ordinances, even among those cities with currently operating markets. Market presence in code is, however, associated with the presence of historically operated markets. These findings raise questions about why markets are missing from codified food policy and what risks this poses to the future of markets. They also highlight the need to better document the market sector and underline the importance of including historic perspectives when examining the efficacy of current food policy efforts.

Landscape change caused by ecological restoration projects has both positive and negative influences on human livelihoods, yet surprisingly little research on the cultural consequences of ecological restoration in agricultural landscapes has taken place. Cultural consequences can be captured in the ecosystem services framework as cultural ecosystem services (CES). However, assessment and valuation of these services to support decision-making for this essential ecosystem is lacking. To help fill this gap, we assessed the opinions of Chinese rural communities about CES and the changes in their perception under the Grain for Green program (GFG), a nationwide program to relieve the pressure on ecosystems (soil erosion and land degradation) by converting cultivated land or barren land on steep slopes into grassland and forests. We used Guyuan City in China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region as a case study, using a workshop to identify the CES provided by the agricultural landscape, followed by semi-structured household interviews to quantify perceptions of these CES. We found that all eight CES types identified by the workshop were perceived by the rural communities. Reforestation changed their perceptions of CES directly due to land cover change and indirectly due to the resulting economic changes and migration of mostly young workers in search of better jobs. Cultivated land was perceived as more important than forest for CES provision. In addition, residential areas were perceived as providing significant CES because of local traditions that produce close and highly social neighborhood bonds in agricultural landscapes.

Traditional vineyards in Spain are being upgraded to trellis vineyards. A key question is to what extent the transition to trellis vineyards is compatible with the environmental preservation goals in Special Protection Areas. This paper presents a GIS-based model to assess the suitability of Special Protection Areas for the development of trellis systems. The model was applied in a Special Protection Area for steppe birds in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, a region with the largest concentration of vineyards in the world. The model includes three components: (1) a vineyard structure analysis, (2) an analysis of habitat fragmentation, and (3) a suitability analysis. The results showed that 50.9% of the study area, including 82.1% of the existing vineyards, was classified as suitable for transition to trellis systems. In the remaining unsuitable areas an increase in trellis systems should be avoided. The model is a stepping stone for improving the sustainable land use development of Mediterranean agricultural landscapes. Further research is needed to include wider socio-economic and environmental consequences of modernizing viticulture practices.

A major challenge today and in the future is to maintain or enhance the beneficial contributions of landscapes to the quality of life of people. Neglecting cultural ecosystem services (CES) in landscape planning can lead to loss of unique cultural landscapes and undermine the well-being of local communities. Despite a rapidly increasing body of literature on CES, little is known about the relationship between socio-cultural values and the non-material benefits of landscapes. To help fill this gap, we assessed the perceptions of people from different ethnic groups about the cultural ecosystem services of local landscapes. We took the Genheyuan National Wetland Park and the adjacent forest areas, a typical mountain forest-wetland ecosystem, as our case area. By combining surveys (250 semi-structured interviews and 26 local stakeholders in Focus Group Discussion) with structural equation modelling (SEM), we gained insights into the importance of landscapes to CES provision from the perspective of stakeholder diversity. Surprisingly, wetlands are perceived as playing more important roles than other landscape types in providing diverse CES, with a 1.25 times higher CES Diversity Index (CDI) than that of forests. Among all demographic factors, ethnicity is most significant in determining people’s perceptions, reflecting the spiritual cognition, manners, and customs of the ethnic groups. The perceptions of CES provided by landscapes are likely to increase if landscape characteristics are attached more to functions in order to meet fundamental human needs.

Urban climate manifests itself through thermal and wind environments specific to cities and can cause wind danger or overheating. Cities can benefit from preventing these effects through adaptation measures. However, before any action can be taken in improving these urban climate conditions, an awareness of the problems is needed. Numerous studies show that there is awareness of urban climate extremes as a problem, yet that knowledge lacks amongst different actors in society, and may further differ between countries. Therefore, we conducted an international study on the awareness levels regarding urban climate phenomena and the sense of urgency to act within four groups: citizens, local politicians, urban planners and designers, and urban climate experts. Semi-structured interviews with experts in ten countries worldwide were conducted. Results indicate that the urgency to adapt to climate change was acknowledged rather equally for the four groups of actors. In contrast, awareness of urban climate phenomena (urban heat islands and urban wind patterns) amongst citizens and politicians is rather low in most countries. Amongst urban planners and designers and the urban climate experts we observed a generally high awareness regarding urban climate phenomena. Raising awareness requires tailor-made strategies for specific needs of the different actor groups.

The agriculture and horticulture sector in the Netherlands is one of the most productive in the world. Although the sector is one of the most advanced and intense agricultural production systems worldwide, it faces challenges, such as climate change and environmental and social unsustainability of industrial production. To overcome these challenges, alternative food production initiatives have emerged, especially in large cities such as Amsterdam. Some initiatives involve producing food in the urban environment, supported by new technologies and practices, so-called high-tech urban agriculture (HTUA). These initiatives make cultivation of plants inside and on top of buildings possible and increase green spaces in urban areas. The emerging agricultural technologies are creating new business environments that are shape d by technology developers (e.g., suppliers of horticultural light emitting diodes (LED) and control environment systems) and developers of alternative food production practices (e.g., HTUA start-ups). However, research shows that the uptake of these technological innovations in urban planning processes is problematic. Therefore, this research analyzes the barriers that local government planners and HTUA developers are facing in the embedding of HTUA in urban planning processes, using the city of Amsterdam as a case study. This study draws on actor-network theory (ANT) to analyze the interactions between planners, technologies, technology developers and developers of alternative food production practices. Several concepts of ANT are integrated into a multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions (MLP) to create a new theoretical framework that can explain how interactions between technologies and planning actors transform the incumbent social&ndash, technical regime. The configuration of interactions between social and material entities in technology development and adoption processes in Amsterdam is analyzed through the lens of this theoretical framework. The data in this study were gathered by tracing actors and their connections by using ethnographic research methods. In the course of the integration of new technologies into urban planning practices, gaps between technologies, technology developers, and planning actors have been identified. The results of this study show a lacking connection between planning actors and technology developers, although planning actors do interact with developers of alternative food production practices. These interactions are influenced by agency of artefacts such as visualizations of the future projects. The paper concludes that for the utilization of emerging technologies for sustainability transition of cities, the existing gap between technology developers and planning actors needs to be bridged through the integration of technology development visions in urban agendas and planning processes.

The continuing decline of arable land per person and global human population growth are raising concerns about food security. Recent advances in horticultural technology (i.e., growing using light-emitting diode (LED) lighting, hydroponics, vertical farming, and controlled environments) have changed the ways in which vegetables can be produced and supplied. The emerging technology makes it possible to produce more food using fewer resources, independent of the weather and the need for land. They allow bringing agricultural practices inside urban built up spaces and making horticultural production an integrated part of the daily life of urban residents. However, the process and consequences of this technology-driven transition on urban planning and development are hardly understood. This paper uses the theory of multi-level perspective (MLP) on sustainability transitions and actor&ndash, network theory (ANT) to explore this technology-driven transition and its adoption in urban planning and development. The high-tech horticulture zone development in Shanghai was used as a case study. The results show the importance of both social (i.e., policymakers and planners) and material (i.e., technologies and policy documents) actants in the transition of the sociotechnical regime. Furthermore, the transition toward sustainable urban horticulture practices requires the simultaneous preparation of supportive and compatible spatial development, agricultural and sustainable development policies, and adequate policy implementation and evaluation tools to increase the competitive strength of innovative practices.

Problems caused by urban climate phenomena such as urban heat island intensification, nuisance winds, or the lack of ventilation, are a growing concern with urban population growth and aging infrastructure. While many possible solutions are known, effective adaptation strategies have been insufficiently implemented to ameliorate urban climate problems. Reasons for this ‘implementation gap’ such as the level of awareness about implementable solutions have received little attention in the literature. An important question thus remains unanswered: what do different urban actors (citizens; politicians; urban planners and designers; and urban climate experts) who shape the urban environment and thus its climate, know about urban climate adaptation measures? We conducted a pilot study using semi-structured interviews with specialists in the field of urban sustainability related to urban planning and climate in ten countries worldwide. Interview results indicated that awareness of adaptation measures differs between countries, but even more so between different actor groups. Citizens and politicians are less aware than urban planners or designers and urban climate experts. Awareness raising should involve media campaigns, further education and display of good practice. Politicians should work on better laws and their enforcement and urban climate experts on good knowledge communication.

Simulation models based on cellular automata (CA) are useful for revealing the complex mechanisms and processes involved in urban growth and have become supplementary tools for urban land use planning and management. Although the urban growth mechanism is characterized by multilevel and spatiotemporal heterogeneity, most existing studies focus only on simulating the urban growth of singular regions without considering the heterogeneity of the urban growth process and the multilevel factors driving urban growth within regions that consist of multiple subregions. Thus, urban growth models have limited performance when simulating the urban growth of multi-regional areas. To address this issue, we propose a multilevel logistic CA model (MLCA) by incorporating a multilevel logistic regression model into the traditional logistic CA model (LCA). In the MLCA, multilevel driving factors are considered, and the multilevel logistic model allows the transition rules to not only vary in space, but also change when the subregional level factors change. To verify the MLCA's validity, it was applied to simulate the urban growth of Tongshan County, located in China's Xuzhou Prefecture. The results were compared with three comparative models, LCA1, which only considered grid cell-level factors; LCA2, which considered both grid cell- and subregional-level factors; and artificial neural network CA. Urban growth data for the periods 2000–2009 and 2009–2017 were used. The results show that the MLCA performs better on both visual comparison and indicators for accuracy verification. The Kappa of the results increased by

Simulation models based on cellular automata (CA) are widely used for understanding and simulating complex urban expansion process. Among these models, logistic CA (LCA) is commonly adopted. However, the performance of LCA models is often limited because the fixed coefficients obtained from binary logistic regression do not reflect the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of transition rules. Therefore, we propose a variable weights LCA (VW-LCA) model with dynamic transition rules. The regression coefficients in this VW-LCA model are based on VW by incorporating a genetic algorithm in a conventional LCA. The VW-LCA model and the conventional LCA model were both used to simulate urban expansion in Nanjing, China. The models were calibrated with data for the period 2000–2007 and validated for the period 2007–2013. The results showed that the VW-LCA model performed better than the LCA model in terms of both visual inspection and key indicators. For example, kappa, accuracy of urban land and figure of merit for the simulation results of 2013 increased by 3.26%, 2.96% and 4.44%, respectively. The VW-LCA model performs relatively better compared with other improved LCA models that are suggested in literature.

This paper discusses the role of collaborations in the development and implementation of sustainable livestock farming. The study reflects upon the experiences with two innovative pig farming concepts in the Netherlands that aim to address sustainability-related concerns regarding the economic viability, environmental impact and social responsibility of livestock production. The findings show that collaborations can result in smarter and innovative solutions and provide support in the development of more sustainable farming oncepts. The study also shows that collaborations do not safeguard the implementing of these concepts in practice. Pioneers are confronted with higher production costs and the complex context of agricultural policies and regulations. These pioneering efforts are, however, the seeds for change, and the key ingredient for a transition towards more sustainable production. We rely upon their innovations, social networks and learning experiences in the transition towards more sustainable production. Therefore, pioneers need to be protected from market influences and regulatory barriers, and supported by intermediaries when developing novelties for a more sustainable agriculture. The findings emphasize the need for more knowledge exchange and understanding between farmers, policy-makers and researchers to navigate towards a more sustainable agriculture in the future.

Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are two essential macronutrients required in agricultural production. The major share of this production relies on chemical fertilizer that requires energy and relies on limited resources (P). Since these nutrients are lost to the environment, there is a need to shift from this linear urban metabolism to a circular metabolism in which N and P from domestic waste and wastewater are reused in agriculture. A first step to facilitate a transition to more circular urban N and P management is to understand the flows of these resources in a coupled urban-agricultural system. For the first time this paper presents a Substance Flow Analysis (SFA) approach for the assessment of the coupled agricultural and urban systems under limited data availability in a small island. The developed SFA approach is used to identify intervention points that can provide N and P stocks for agricultural production. The island of St. Eustatius, a small island in the Caribbean, was used as a case study. The model developed in this study consists of eight sub-systems: agricultural and natural lands, urban lands, crop production, animal production, market, household consumption, soakage pit and open-dump landfill. A total of 26 flows were identified and quantified for a period of one year (2013). The results showed that the agricultural system is a significant source for N and P loss because of erosion/run-off and leaching. Moreover, urban sanitation systems contribute to deterioration of the island's ecosystem through N and P losses from domestic waste and wastewater by leaching and atmospheric emission. Proposed interventions are the treatment of blackwater and greywater for the recovery of N and P. In conclusion, this study allows for identification of potential N and P losses and proposes mitigation measures to improve nutrient management in a small island context.

Land use has been changing in the last decades because of agricultural intensification and land abandonment which implies deterioration in the optimum habitat structure and quality. Habitat degradation and loss, resulting from changes in land use remain significant drivers of biodiversity loss. These trends are widely recognised and have forced national and international agencies to identify protected sites for natural areas with high biodiversity value. Special Protection Areas (SPAs) are natural zones particularly relevant for nature conservation. Regional planning is bound to play an increasing role in nature conservation policies because much bio-diversity is located in farming areas outside natural parks. A Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to implement a decision tool system to analyse the feasibility of new proposals to upgrade traditional vineyards in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. The study focuses on the sustainability of current farming practices in Special Protection Areas for Steppe Land Birds. This paper presents a model to quantify the resulting habitat fragmentation basing on infrastructure facilities, leading to mapping areas where to apply restriction measures to prevent physical destruction of the habitat.

Economic growth in China is accompanied by many problems, such as rapid deterioration of the environment and a sharp decline in the area of arable land. China’s current land-use planning system fails to deal with these problems, especially at the regional level. The lack of sustainable spatial allocation at regional level has become a pressing problem. This article aims to: (1) analyze the reason why sustainable land use at the regional level is difficult to achieve under the current Chinese land-use planning system, (2) put forward a regional optimization model for sustainable land use, and (3) explore the usefulness and possibility of the future application of the model in supporting land-use planning. The model has been applied in a case study for the Poyang Lake Region, Jiangxi Province in China. Based on predictions of the demand of land in 2015, three single-objective scenarios were constructed: food production oriented, nature conservation oriented and economic growth oriented. An optimized, multi-objective pattern of sustainable land use was achieved by integrating the three single-objective scenarios. The relevance and applicability of the model were discussed with planning experts and practitioners. The results indicate that the model can contribute to a more sustainable regional land-use planning in China. However, the results also show a need for further research on how to embed wider social and economic aspects in the model.

Public policies are needed to guide livestock sector’s changes along a path that is sustainable in economic, social and environmental terms. These policies should include multiple development objectives and be adapted to location-specific contexts. Policy makers need assistance in dealing with such complex decisions. Spatial information can be integrated in decision support tools to support policy making, and is becoming increasingly available in the developing world. Spatial information, however, has seldom been used in livestock sector policy formulation because policy makers generally do not have access to resources for spatial modelling. The objective of this paper is to bridge this gap by proposing an approach to consolidating and analysing spatial information in the context of limited modelling resources. Rooted in practical experience, a method is proposed that combines two multiple criteria decision-making techniques (weighted linear combination and analytical hierarchical processes), parameterised in a participatory process and implemented in a GIS. The method is tested in two different contexts: support to single objective decision-making for targeting trypanosomiasis control interventions in Uganda, and support to multiple objective decision-making for spatial planning of livestock production development in Thailand. The results show the advantages of such an approach, in terms of stakeholder involvement and practical application to support decision-making, but also highlight two shortcomings: dependence on high quality data and uncertainty with regard to the decision rule. While the former will be addressed as digital information becomes increasingly available, the latter, embedded in any decision-making process, calls for thorough sensitivity analyses and careful scrutiny of results.

This paper describes a support tool that incorporates environmental aspects in local spatial planning processes. The tool aims to support the work of local authorities and urban planning offices, especially with regard to identifying options in the early phases of the planning process. The tool has been developed and implemented in a Geographical Information System (GIS) and evaluated for a case study in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The results show the importance of communicative aspects for these kinds of tools, especially for tools that aim to stimulate several disciplines in working together. The results also show that geo-information tools can easily become too complex, and turn out to be ‘black boxes’ for participants in the planning process. Therefore, it is important to keep these tools as simple as possible, and to make clear how the results of the planning process will benefit from their use.

This chapter describes a research project that aims to improve the quality of physical plans on a local level and to create a basis for communication between disciplines and stakeholders that are dealing with environmental and spatial planning. A GIS tool for integrating environmental aspects into planning procedures has been developed. Although the research shows the potential for the use of the tool in practice, we still are very far away from supporting participatory planning. The research clearly indicates that the current planning practice is not well equipped to deal with real-time participation.

In The Netherlands, a debate continues to take place on how to allocate the available space among several types of land use. The rural area is under constant pressure from urban developments. Multi-purpose land use is becoming more and more important. Land-use allocation problems can be identified as complex planning problems, with a large number of stakeholders involved. Therefore the decisions made with respect to land use must be clear and transparent to these stakeholders. Various methods have been developed to support land allocation issues. Typically, however, the analysis of topological relationships, initiated by biophysical and socio-economic processes, and the spatial configuration of different land uses, is often neglected, especially for agricultural planning. Neglecting the spatial configuration and these relationships can result in spatial fragmentation of land use, thus endangering sustainable land use. This paper focuses on a method to address land-use allocation issues where the topological relationships are taken into account. The method is implemented in a Geographical Information System (GIS). Two cases for Dutch agriculture are discussed.

Domestic wastewater contains resources, such as nutrients, water, organic matter which can be reused in agriculture. Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are two essential macronutrients for crop production. The reuse of recovered products containing these nutrients can contribute to lowered use of fossil energy and saves P reserves. This reuse enhances economic circularity of cities, urban areas or small islands. A number of sanitation planning approaches have been developed aiming to solve the aforementioned problems. However, some challenges on planning have not been addressed in a holistic way when considering the full train of sanitation technologies and is not better integrated with agricultural systems. The assessments are also not considering the four domains of sustainability: environmental, technological, social-economic, and economic, and also trends of future development. Hence, a new planning approach needs to be developed to promote resource recovery and reuse under different future developments.

Maintaining and enhancing landscapes’ beneficial contributions to a good quality of life is a major challenge of our time. Landscapes have been and are being changed by processes such as urbanization, economic development and ecological restorations which may sharply change the landscapes, and these changes may affect the ways in which people interact with their landscapes. The concept of Ecosystem Services (ES) has been widely adopted by scientists and policymakers as a framework to assess the consequences of landscape interventions, on provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services. CES refer to the benefits people receive from ecosystems in the form of spiritual, religious, recreational, inspirational and educational experiences.To inform decision-making for sustainable landscape management, an elicitation of people’s concerns associated with their landscapes from socio-cultural perspectives is. However, current approaches of investigating CES have been criticized for voluntary self-exclusion of disciplines, over-valuing tourist-attractive landscapes and neglecting critical social impacts or dynamics. Moreover, due to the limitation of accessible data and applicable methods, rarely does research capture the cultural diversity of CES perceived by local communities and little is known about how CES change under human interventions.The objective of this research was to investigate the non-material links between people and landscapes by analysing CES from an interdisciplinary perspective, in four typical Chinese landscapes (Dryland agricultural landscape, wetlands, grasslands and coastal wetlands). The research especially addresses the subjective nature of CES perception and the socio-cultural consequences of ecological restoration and conservation projects through their influence on CES perception. The approach incorporates the perceived values that local communities attach to landscapes and overcomes the limited application of non-spatiality explicit CES in broader ecosystem assessment by assessing the perceptions of local communities. Data were gathered by questionnaires survey or semi-structured interviews depending on the local context, as well as participatory mapping and field observations to further diagnose CES appraisal and their spatial distribution.Synthesizing the findings of this research, there are several conclusions we can draw: 1) In general, Aesthetic services, Recreational services, Education and science, Inspirations, Sense of place, Cultural heritage, Religious and spiritual services and Physical and mental health are all highly perceived in China’s typical landscapes including wetlands, grassland, cultivated lands and coastal wetlands. Social relations were only identified in wetlands and coastal wetlands. 2) Demographic characteristics affect the perception of CES, especially ethnicity, age and education. Although demographic characteristics determine how people perceive CES, no generic rules such as “women tend to perceive more CES than men” or “old people tend to perceive more CES than young people” could be found. 3) Landscape features play a different role in different landscapes, but dominant landscape features are perceived as more important by local communities. The appreciation appeared to be closely linked to the intensity of the interaction and common landscape features are more appreciated than special landscape features. 4) Human interventions, including ecological restoration, conservation and local economic development influence CES perception, by influencing the opportunities for local people to engage with their landscapes, as well as potentially influencing the demographic characteristics of local communities (such as occupation, income and even age composition). Ecological restoration tends to have a positive effect on recreational services but a negative effect on sense of place.Despite the limitations of data and methods, we showed that considering cultural ecosystem services, local communities, and the way they interact with different landscape features in ecological conservation and landscape management can help to improve conservation effectiveness, and pioneer new co-management arrangements.