**1. Introduction**

232 Landscape Planning

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Volume 28, Issue 1, pp. 294-305

Press

March 2009.

How people utilize the land and their socio-economic activity taking place are the principal causes of the changes occurring in land cover, and thus, affecting greatly environment at a global level. However, the land use and management decisions taken often fail to consider this influence on ecology.

Human activity reflected particularly in urban and agricultural land use alters the capacity of the Earth, through its impacts on the physical material and ecological systems. This in turn adversely influences the basic resources that humans need and together with the gradual population growth lead to significant changes in land use (Dale et al., 2001). Despite this significance, however, land use decisions often neglect these impacts. Land use and land management should seek to establish a balance between different and often-conflicting interests regarding the use of the land, such as resource extraction, agriculture, industry, urban development, and complex ecological systems (ESA Committee on Land Use, 2000).

As some species and resources need structural and functional integrity of landscapes, landscape conservation approaches should be present in decision-making processes. Moreover, the multi-faceted characteristics of environmental problems necessitate the incorporation of ecological, socio-cultural and economic approaches in planning and the cooperation of individuals from different disciplines. Ecological landscape plans present a significant opportunity for implementing landscape conservation approaches and for contributing to the sustainability of landscapes. Ecological landscape planning has five stages: division into landscapes, inventory of nature conservation value and socio-cultural factors, landscape analysis, landscape plan, regeneration of biotopes (SCA Skog, 2011). The following section presents an overview of landscape ecology and details its principles and their use in landscape planning. The third section discusses the integration of ecological planning approaches in landscape planning, the fourth section coastal zone planning.

### **2. Landscape ecology principles and landscape planning**

What landscape planning signifies today used to be considered within the concept land use planning until three decades ago. Landscape planning, as a concept, emerged due to the growing awareness and concerns about problems and the developments that took place in the society (Marsh, 2005). Although similar at first sight with land use planning, as both of

Ecological Landscape Planning, with a Focus on the Coastal Zone 235

An edge is the outer section of a patch displaying different characteristics than the interior conditions of a patch, in terms of vertical and horizontal structure, width, and species composition and abundance. These differences constitute the edge effect and the edge acting as a transition zone between habitats presents opportunities for landscape planners to facilitate the achievement of an ecological goal. While the shapes of patches can be natural, i.e. due to their boundaries, they can as well be artificial, i.e. administrative, and thus, differ

**Edge Boundaries Shapes of patches** 

boundaries

width Coves and lobes

 Natural and human edges Straight and curvilinear Edge and interior species

Stream corridor and dissolved substances Corridor width for main

Corridor width for a river Connectivity of a stream

stream

corridor

 Interaction with surroundings Ecologically "optimum" patch shape Shape and orientation

 Hard and soft boundaries Edge curvilinearity and

Habitat loss and isolation, results of spatial processes such as fragmentation, dissection, perforation, shrinkage and attrition, necessitate the establishment of connections within the landscape. In the face of these challenges, it is ever more fundamental to preserve the integrity of landscape corridors, such as wildlife corridors and river systems can as well be thought as barriers to wildlife movement, as in the example of roadways, railroad and canals (Dramstad et al., 1996). Pattern and scale can be used to assess the integrity of a

Corridors Barriers Stream and River Corridors

corridors

control

Roads and other "trough"

Wind erosion and its

to a varying extent from natural edges (Dramstad et al., 1996). (Table 2).

**2.2 Edges and boundaries** 

Edge structural diversity

 Administrative and natural ecological boundary

**2.3 Corridors and connectivity** 

Controls on corridors functions Corridor gap effectiveness

Stepping stone connectivity Distance between stepping stones

Loss of a stepping stone Cluster of stepping stones

Structural versus floristic similarity

Table 3. Catagorize of corridors and connectivity

Table 2. Edge, boundaries, and shapes of patches

**For species movement Road and windreak barriers** 

Edge width

 Edge as filter Edge abruptness

landscape (Table 3).

**Stepping Stones** 

them deal with the macro environment, landscape planning focuses on the resources and systems of landscape in the planning and management decisions.

Coined in the late 1930s and developed thanks to aerial photography, landscape ecology originally focused on the spatial patterns created by the environment and vegetation. Ecology studies the interactions of organisms with their environment, and a landscape is a mosaic with ecosystems and land uses. Landscape ecology focuses on heterogeneous land mosaics, where the distribution, movement and flow of living beings and materials could be easily observed and foreseen. The principles of landscape ecology, particularly taking the landscape as the unit of study, later gained prominence in landscape planning. Several authors, like McHarg (1969) and Steiner (1991), sought to bridge the gap between landscape ecology and planning and gave way to the development of ecological approaches of landscape planning. More recently, the concept 'ecological landscape planning' has gained prominence (Cook & Lier, 1994). Whereas it is commonplace in landscape planning to use administrative boundaries or watersheds (Cook & Lier, 1994), the methodology of ecological landscape planning is based on landscape ecology. In addition, landscape ecology is related to land evaluation. The focus of land evaluation has changed considerably since the 1960s, from classification and potentiality, to feasibility and lastly sustainable land use in the 1990s (Peng et al., 2006). As both concepts share a common emphasis on social, economic and ecological values, landscape ecology could be utilized in relation with sustainable land use evaluation (Peng et al., 2006; Turner, 1989).

Ecological approaches of landscape planning constitute guidelines that shed light on various steps of planning processes such as data collection and analysis, participation and eventual monitoring (Langevelde, 1994). Ecological principles are functional in maintaining the integrity of landscape by increasing connectivity and minimizing fragmentation and land degradation. Below, four landscape ecological principles are presented: patches, edges and boundaries, corridors and connectivity, and mosaics (Dramstad et al., 1996).

#### **2.1 Patches**

Patches can have both positive and negative impacts on landscape. While forest patches between agricultural areas may prove beneficial for the ecological health, a landfill next to a sensitive wetland may have an adverse effect (Dramstad et al., 1996). Below, patches are categorized according to size, number, and location (Table 1).


Table 1. Categorized of patch
