**4. The solution for healthier landscape – centre region of Portugal**

The solutions developed to attain a healthier landscape involve the creation of a multifunctional landscape, with native or archaeophytes species, agriculture, and pastureland. The planned landscape will allow to create businesses, generate employment (landscape recovery companies, native species nurseries, forest management companies, reactivation of native wood business), and unique products (non-wood products, such as flour from oak acorns, chestnut, walnut, honey and mushroom production) capable of attracting nature tourism as well.

This landscape will then provide better ecosystem services, such as water quality, soil conservation, and biodiversity improvement, among others. Together, it will develop a fire resilient landscape, which is the landscape's capacity to absorb the disturbance caused by rural fires without losing its function, structure, and identity and ultimately weakening fire frequency and intensity or magnitude [53].

The vision for a healthier landscape of the Centre Region was developed by the application of FIRELAN [53], which is an ecologically based model that integrates different principles related to landscape fire resilience and ecological sustainability into a land-use plan, using the river basin as a landscape unit. The FIRELAN pretends to provide a multifunctional landscape (**Figure 4**) with benefits to the environment, but also developing economies and rural communities.

*Contributing to Healthy Landscapes by Sustainable Land Use Planning: A Vision for Restoring... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99666*

The different components of the FIRELAN network for the Centre Region are mapped in **Figure 5**. The FIRELAN network is the main landscape structure with physical, biological, and cultural elements (**Table 3**). For each component there is a set of adequate land uses that should be promoted. Those land uses are identified in **Figure 6** and in **Table 4**. In the interstices of the FIRELAN network, also called Complementary Areas, the land use possibilities are wider.

**Figure 5.**

*FIRELAN network components in the Centre region of Portugal.*


**Table 3.**

*Components of FIRELAN and sources for the Centre region of Portugal.*

The potential land uses plan (**Figure 6**, **Table 4**) highlights that:


Comparing potential land use and current land use map allows defining a Landscape Transformation Plan with conservation and restoration actions. According to the developed plan (**Figure 7**, **Table 5**): 35% of the Centre region should have restoration actions, and 57% should be maintained and conserved. Also, according to the results:


*Contributing to Healthy Landscapes by Sustainable Land Use Planning: A Vision for Restoring... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99666*

**Figure 6.**

*Potential land uses in the Centre region of Portugal.*
