Landscape approaches to assess environmental security: summary, conclusions, and recommendations

Landscape sciences emphasize the importance of spatial pattern and scale in determining the relative degree of environmental security. The primary hypothesis of the landscape sciences is that spatial pattern and distribution of biotic and abiotic attributes of the environment, including people, are important determinants of landscape processes and structures which in turn provide ecological goods and services upon which society depends. Because of the emphasis on spatial pattern and scale, the landscape sciences also provide insight into how the spatial distribution of human activities influences important landscape processes and structures from which services are derived. As such, the landscape sciences provide a way to determine the continuous interplay between changes in the conditions of human needs (social, economic, cultural) and changes in the environment. The methodologies of the landscape sciences are applied at different scales and hierarchical levels of organization in the context of complex adaptive socioeconomic and ecological systems.