Addressing the social landscape dimensions: The need for reconciling cross scale assessments for capturing Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES)

Abstract

This special issue integrates eleven papers focussing on indicators able to convey the multiple expectations that society has concerning agricultural land. As scale issues have been so far overlooked within this research topic, a particular focus of this themed issue is to highlight the need for reconciling assessments across scales. The shared purpose of the contributions is to examine how the multiple societal expectations concerning agrarian landscapes might be incorporated into land use policy at different governance levels. A core set of these papers were presented in the symposium “Linking social indicators across scales”, to the European Congress of the International Association of Landscape Ecology (IALE) in September 2013 in Manchester, UK. This symposium was organized to create the time and space for a discussion on the issues of scale when capturing societal preferences concerning agrarian landscapes. While the landscape scale was specifically addressed by four papers, seven papers examined broader geographic units in addition to up-scaling and downscaling issues.