Landscape sustainability science (II): core questions and key approaches

Urban landscape sustainability in karst mountainous cities: A landscape resilience perspective

In the context of the rapid progress of global urbanization, the massive encroachment of social landscapes into ecological and productive landscapes has led to a series of environmental problems. Furthermore, analyzing the landscape resilience could effectively reveal the sustainable development ability of the urban landscape. This study establishes a social-ecological productive landscape resilience (SEPLR) evaluation system and reveals trade-offs and synergies between different landscape types and resilience. Finally, this study provides landscape management zonings based on the spatial and temporal dynamic characteristics of landscape resilience and subsystem resilience. The findings showed that: (1) The CUAG has significant landscape heterogeneity and change drastically, which is mainly manifested by the massive encroachment of social landscape into productive landscape. (2) The SEPLR of CUAG decreased slightly by 0.75 % over the decade, with significant changes of spatial distribution. (3) The comprehensive remediation areas and social development areas are the dominant management zones. The findings could be incorporated into the decision-making of land use trade-off development in CUAG to promote the coordinated development of social-ecological productive systems and improve the sustainability of urban landscape.

New criteria for sustainable land use planning of metropolitan green infrastructures in the tropical Andes

Context

Urbanization is rapidly increasing worldwide, with about 60% of the global population currently residing in cities and expected to reach 68% by 2050. In Latin America's tropical Andes region, managing these changes poses challenges, including biodiversity loss and vulnerability to climate change.

Objectives

This study assesses urban growth and agricultural intensification impacts on the ecological functionality of metropolitan green infrastructures and their capacity to provide ecosystem services using a landscape sustainability and sociometabolic approach. Specifically, it aims to identify landscape configurations promoting socio-ecological sustainability amidst rapid urbanization.

Methods

A landscape-metabolic model (IDC) was applied to evaluate the interactions between land use changes and ecosystem functions in the metropolitan region of Cali.

Results

Agricultural intensification and industrialization, coupled with uncontrolled urban growth, have significantly transformed the landscape, posing threats to its sustainability. The prevailing biocultural landscapes hold a substantial potential to provide essential ecosystem services to the metropolis. The IDC offers an approach that utilizes a land cover map and agricultural production/metabolism data to calculate an indicator closely related to ecosystem services and multifunctionality.

Conclusions

The IDC model stands out for efficiently capturing landscape dynamics, providing insights into landscape configuration and social metabolism without extensive resource requirements. This research highlights the importance of adopting a landscape-metabolic and green infrastructure framework to guide territorial policies in the tropical Andes and similar regions. It stresses the need for informed land use planning to address challenges and leverage opportunities presented by biocultural landscapes for regional sustainability amidst rapid urbanization and agricultural expansion.

Designing mosaic landscapes for sustainable outcome: Evaluating land-use options on ecosystem service provisioning in southwestern Ghana

The landscape in southwestern Ghana faces rampant modification due to socio-economic activities, posing threats to ecosystem service provision and environmental sustainability. Addressing these threats involves empowering land-use actors to design landscapes that offer multiple benefits concurrently. This study employs a geodesign framework, integrating participatory ecosystem service assessment and spatial simulations. This geodesign framework aims to design the landscape in a collaborative manner in a way that supports multiple benefits concurrently, mitigating the threats posed by landscape modification. Reflecting on local land-use perceptions during a workshop, we developed land-use options and land management strategies based on selected land-cover types. We identified urban greens, open space restoration, rubber mixed-stands, mangrove restoration, selective-cutting land preparation, soil conservation, and relay cropping as land-use options to target selected land-cover types of shrubland, cropland, smallholder rubber, smallholder palm, wetland, and settlement. The land management strategies translated into landscape scenarios based on local need conditions. We generated the local need conditions which translated into the landscape scenarios by reflecting on the location of land-cover types, 'change-effect' conditions within rubber, settlement, and cropland, and 'no-change'conditions within cropland. Results indicate synergies between the created landscape scenarios and ecosystem service provisioning, with 'no-change' within cropland providing the highest synergy and 'change-effect' within rubber providing the least synergy. Spatial modeling of local perceptions forms the novelty of this study, as the fusion of participatory assessments and spatial modeling allows for a more holistic understanding of the landscape, its services, and the potential implications of different management strategies. The geodesign framework facilitated the design of the complex heterogeneous landscape to visualize possibilities of maximizing multiple benefits and can be used for future planning on the landscape.

The resilience-sustainability-quality of life nexus

Social-ecological resilience (SER), sustainability (SUS) and quality of life including wellbeing (QOL) are distinct but highly interconnected goals that are essential for human survival, development, and adaptation to environmental and socioeconomic changes. However, these goals are often addressed in silos or pairs, and a framework explicitly linking all three is currently lacking. In this paper, we present the SER-SUS-QOL nexus framework and discuss how social and ecological changes affect these goals. The main thrust of this nexus is that efforts toward SER and SUS need to be explicitly framed in terms of the ultimate goal, which has to be the QOL of the present and future generations. We contend that critically assessing the dynamic interplay between SER, SUS and QOL, as well as the factors impacting them, can help promote transformative governance and planning in the contemporary era. Understanding the multifaceted interrelationship between these goals is crucial to empower planners and decision-makers to navigate the complexities of our rapidly changing world and address the challenges brought by interrelated social and ecological changes. To deepen our understanding of this nexus, more research is needed on various issues, including, but not limited to, trade-offs and synergies, cascading effects, spatiotemporal dynamics of SER, SUS and QOL outcomes, potential inconsistencies between SER and transformative changes toward SUS, and the role of local/indigenous/traditional ecological knowledge in transformative governance and planning.

Identifying broken linkages coupling water availability and dryland urbanization for sustainability: The case of the Phoenix metropolitan region, USA

One third of the world's largest cities are located in drylands, where much of future urbanization is projected to occur. This is paradoxical and unsustainable considering water scarcity in drylands, which is exacerbated by climate change. Thus, it is critical to better understand why and how dryland urbanization and water scarcity are decoupled so that sustainable measures can be designed. Focusing on the Phoenix Metropolitan Area (PMA) of the United States, we addressed the following questions: 1) What are the relative influences of water and economic factors on urbanization in recent decades? 2) Which linkages connecting water storage to urban development have been decoupled? and 3) How can water availability and development be better coupled to improve regional sustainability? We tested the relationships between economic factors, water availability, and urbanization, with Pearson Correlation Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling. We found that, from 1986 to 2019, urban population growth and urban land expansion in the PMA were driven by economic factors, and not influenced by fluctuations in water supply. We identified specific broken linkages among water storage, water deliveries, municipal water supply, and urbanization, which must be coupled to enforce water availability constraints on urban expansion in the context of climate change. Our study has important implications for dryland urban sustainability as urbanization on borrowed water is, by definition, unsustainable.

Impacts of landscape pattern evolution on typical ecosystem services in Ganjiang River Basin, China

Understanding the response mechanism of ecosystem services (ES) to landscape patterns is important in regional landscape planning and sustainable development. In this study, the landscape index and InVEST model were used to quantitatively analyze the spatio-temporal evolution of landscape patterns and ES in the Ganjiang River Basin of China from 1990 to 2020. Furthermore, the bivariate Moran's I method and spatial error model were used to test the spatial correlation between landscape index and ES. The results showed that (1) cropland decreased and construction land increased, and the overall landscape tended to be fragmented, the patch shape complicated, and landscape diversity increased from 1990 to 2020. Water conservation (WC) and soil conservation (SC) capacity increased by 10.56 mm and 16.24 t hm-2 a-1, respectively, whereas carbon storage (CS) decreased by 1.22 t hm-2 a-1. (2) The responses of different typical ES to landscape patterns were different in the landscape index and response degree. Typical ES negatively responded to Shannon's diversity index and patch density. WC was sensitive to the Splitting Index, whereas SC and CS were more responsive to the average patch area. (3) The overall purpose of territorial spatial planning within a basin should be to reduce the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the landscape. According to four local aggregation patterns of landscape index and ES, corresponding measures can be taken according to local conditions in different regions. These results can provide a quantitative basis for landscape management and ecological construction in the Ganjiang River Basin and scientific guidance for the Yangtze River conservation strategy.

How does the temporal relationship between ecosystem services and human wellbeing change in space and time? Evidence from Inner Mongolian drylands

Studies of the ecosystem services (ES) and human wellbeing (HWB) relationship have proliferated in recent decades, but few have examined how ES affect HWB over time in a region (i.e., the temporal ES-HWB relationship) and how this relationship varies between regions. Thus, this study was intended to address these questions using data from Inner Mongolia. We first quantified multiple indicators of ES and objective HWB from 1978 to 2019, and then quantified their temporal relationship with correlation analysis over the entire duration and during four development periods, respectively. Our results showed that, depending on the time periods of analysis, geographic locations, and indicators, the temporal ES-HWB relationship varied substantially in both correlation strength and directionality (r values ranged from -0.93 to +1). Specifically, food-related provisioning services and cultural services often showed significant positive relationships with income, consumption, and basic living needs (r values ranged from +0.43 to +1), but erratic relationships with equity, employment, and social relationships (r values ranged from -0.93 to +0.96). Also, the positive correlations between food-related provisioning services and HWB were generally weaker in the urbanized regions. Cultural services and HWB were more strongly correlated in later development periods, whereas the relationship between regulating services and HWB was quite variable in space and time. The variations in the relationship over different development periods may be attributable to changing environmental and socioeconomic conditions, while the variations between regions were likely due to spatial heterogeneity of influencing factors. Our findings have an important policy implication for Inner Mongolia and beyond: sustainable management based on the ES and HWB relationship must be temporally adaptive and spatially tailored.

Quantifying the impact of green infrastructure change on landscape patterns using intensity analysis and landscape metrics in the Taipei metropolitan area

Developing a sound urban green infrastructure system is critical for addressing climate change. Green infrastructure (GI) also plays an essential role in the urban system by providing ecosystem services for urban residents. Although some research on GI has been published in Taiwan, there is a lack of understanding of how changes in land use and GI affect the landscape patterns in urban fringe areas. This study explores the impact of changes in GI on the landscape pattern of the urban fringe and urban core areas in the Taipei metropolitan area (TMA). We used intensity analysis to investigate changes in land area and land use intensity between 1981 and 2015 at three levels: interval, category, and transition. Landscape metrics were employed to analyze changes in GI patterns. We found, firstly, that although the rate of change in the urban core area of the TMA was faster than the rate of change in the urban fringe area during 1981-1995 and 1995-2006, changes in the urban fringe area nevertheless maintained a state of rapid change in 1995-2006 and 2006-2015. Secondly, forest and agricultural lands in urban fringe areas were the GI categories with the greatest changes in area from 1981 to 2015. Thirdly, transition areas among forest, agricultural, and built-up areas in urban fringe areas were larger during 1995-2015 than 1981-1995. Finally, the results of landscape pattern analysis indicate that the urban fringe area of the TMA is experiencing landscape fragmentation. Although forest land remained the main category in the urban fringe from 1981 to 2015, the integrity of its patch area decreased over time, and the prevalence of small and complex patches of built-up and agricultural land increased. Spatial planning should therefore consider how to build a GI system to promote ecosystem services in urban fringe areas so as to enhance the ability to respond to climate change.

Global shocks, cascading disruptions, and (re-)connections: viewing the COVID-19 pandemic as concurrent natural experiments to understand land system dynamics

Context

For nearly three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted human well-being and livelihoods, communities, and economies in myriad ways with consequences for social-ecological systems across the planet. The pandemic represents a global shock in multiple dimensions that has already, and is likely to continue to have, far-reaching effects on land systems and on those depending on them for their livelihoods.

Objectives

We focus on the observed effects of the pandemic on landscapes and people composing diverse land systems across the globe.

Methods

We highlight the interrelated impacts of the pandemic shock on the economic, health, and mobility dimensions of land systems using six vignettes from different land systems on four continents, analyzed through the lens of socio-ecological resilience and the telecoupling framework. We present preliminary comparative insights gathered through interviews, surveys, key informants, and authors' observations and propose new research avenues for land system scientists.

Results

The pandemic's effects have been unevenly distributed, context-specific, and dependent on the multiple connections that link land systems across the globe.

Conclusions

We argue that the pandemic presents concurrent "natural experiments" that can advance our understanding of the intricate ways in which global shocks produce direct, indirect, and spillover effects on local and regional landscapes and land systems. These propagating shock effects disrupt existing connections, forge new connections, and re-establish former connections between peoples, landscapes, and land systems.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-023-01604-2.

Construction and optimization strategy of ecological security pattern based on ecosystem services and landscape connectivity: a case study of Guizhou Province, China

Rapid urbanization and irrational human activities have induced in numerous environmental problems, seriously threatening regional ecological security. The establishment and optimization of ecological security patterns (ESPs) were considered as a nature-based solution and an effective way for sustainable development. In this study, the Guizhou Province, a representative karst mountainous region in the southwest of China, was used as the study region. The ecological sources were identified and optimized through integrating ecosystem services and landscape connectivity, and the ecological resistance surface was corrected by representative features of karst areas. The circuit theory was adopted to extract the ecological corridors and barriers. We found that the three ecosystem services (i.e., water conservation, biodiversity maintenance, and soil conservation) had remarkable spatial heterogeneity. The area of optimized ecological sources was enlarged 4752.14 km². The number of corridors was reduced from 73 to 47 after optimization, with a total length decreased by 1251.97 km. The optimized ecological network structure considerably enhanced ecological connectivity, among the γ index increased by 0.0014, the β index reduced by 0.0833, while the α index did not change significantly. We concluded that quantitatively exploring the impacts of ecological source optimization are significant for enhancing ecological connectivity. The approach of our study proposes a novel idea into the ESP construction that can provide a meaningful reference for ecological protection and restoration.

The dynamic relationships between landscape structure and ecosystem services: An empirical analysis from the Wuhan metropolitan area, China

Environmental managers have been striving to optimize landscape structure to achieve a sustained supply of ecosystem services (ESs). However, we still lack a full understanding of the relationships between landscape structure and ESs due to the absence of thorough investigations on the variability of these relationships in space and time. To fill this critical gap, we assessed landscape structure alongside four important ESs (agricultural production (AP), carbon sequestration (CS), soil conservation (SC), and water retention (WR)) in the Wuhan metropolitan area (WMA), and then analyzed the spatiotemporal impacts of landscape structure on ESs from 2000 to 2020 using Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression. The results show only AP maintained a stable growth trend over the past two decades, while the other ESs fluctuated considerably with a noticeable decline in SC and WR. The importance of landscape structure in influencing ESs varies by time and place, depending on the local landscape composition and configuration. In general, landscape composition has a stronger and less temporally stable impact on ESs compared to configuration. Furthermore, increases in landscape diversity, as measured through Shannon's diversity index, and the percentage of woodlands were found to contribute to the simultaneous benefits of multiple ESs, but in most cases the effects of landscape structure on different ESs were different or even opposite, suggesting that trade-offs are critical in landscape management. The findings highlight the complex response of ESs to dramatically changing landscapes in the WMA and can guide decision-makers in precise spatial arrangement and temporal adjustments to improve current landscape management.

Landscape products for sustainable agricultural landscapes

Landscape products link to low-input practices and traditional ecological knowledge, and have multiple functions supporting human well-being and sustainability. Here we explore seven landscape products worldwide to identify these multiple functions in the context of food commodification and landscape sustainability. We show that a landscape products lens can improve food systems by fostering sustainability strategies and standards that are place-sensitive, and as such can mitigate conflicts related to food production, social justice and the environment. Co-management strategies and information policies, such as certification, labelling, product information and raising of awareness could accelerate, incentivize and catalyse actions to support landscape products in the context of sustainability strategies.

Urban greenspace helps ameliorate people's negative sentiments during the COVID-19 pandemic: The case of Beijing

The COVID-19 pandemic has had negative effects on people's mental health worldwide, especially for those who live in large cities. Studies have reported that urban greenspace may help lessen these adverse effects, but more research that explicitly considers urban landscape pattern is needed to understand the underlying processes. Thus, this study was designed to examine whether the resident sentiments in Beijing, China changed before and during the pandemic, and to investigate what urban landscape attributes - particularly greenspace - might contribute to the sentiment changes. We conducted sentiment analysis based on 25,357 geo-tagged microblogs posted by residents in 51 neighborhoods. We then compared the resident sentiments in 2019 (before the COVID-19) with those in 2020 (during the COVID-19) using independent sample t-tests, and examined the relationship between resident sentiments and urban greenspace during the COVID-19 pandemic phases using stepwise regression. We found that residents' sentiments deteriorated significantly from 2019 to 2020 in general, and that urban sentiments during the pandemic peak times showed an urban-suburban trend that was determined either by building density or available greenspace. Although our analysis included several other environmental and socioeconomic factors, none of them showed up as a significant factor. Our study suggests the effects of urban greenspace and building density on residents' sentiments increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and that not all green spaces are equal. Increasing greenspace, especially within and near neighborhoods, seems critically important to helping urban residents to cope with public health emergencies such as global pandemics.

Quantifying Ecological Landscape Quality of Urban Street by Open Street View Images: A Case Study of Xiamen Island, China

With the unprecedented urbanization processes around the world, cities have become the main areas of political, cultural, and economic creation, but these regions have also caused environmental degradation and even affected public health. Ecological landscape is considered as an important way to mitigate the impact of environmental exposure on urban residents. Therefore, quantifying the quality of urban road landscape and exploring its spatial heterogeneity to obtain basic data on the urban environment and provide ideas for urban residents to improve the environment will be a meaningful preparation for further urban planning. In this study, we proposed a framework to achieve automatic quantifying urban street quality by integrating a mass of street view images based on deep learning and landscape ecology. We conducted a case study in Xiamen Island and mapped a series of spatial distribution for ecological indicators including PLAND, LPI, AI, DIVISION, FRAC_MN, LSI and SHDI. Additionally, we quantified street quality by the entropy weight method. Our results showed the streetscape quality of the roundabout in Xiamen was relatively lower, while the central urban area presented a belt-shaped area with excellent landscape quality. We suggested that managers could build vertical greening on some streets around the Xiamen Island to improve the street quality in order to provide greater well-being for urban residents. In this study, it was found that there were still large uncertainties in the mechanism of environmental impact on human beings. We proposed to strengthen the in-depth understanding of the mechanism of environmental impact on human beings in the process of interaction between environment and human beings, and continue to form general models to enhance the ability of insight into the urban ecosystem.

Spatial identification of restored priority areas based on ecosystem service bundles and urbanization effects in a megalopolis area

Rapid urbanization has altered the structure and function of urban ecosystems with respect to the demand for planning ecological restoration to inhibit ecological degradation. However, there is still a challenge to quickly and effectively identify the restored priority areas to maximize ecological service (ES) supply and enhance human well-being. Taking the Shenzhen metropolitan region as a case study area, this study identified the restored priority sites based on the ES bundles evolution and urbanization effects. The ES bundles were identified by analyzing the spatial dynamics under the hybrid urban landscape, then the impact of urbanization on the ES bundles was explored using linear regression analysis characterized by different levels of urbanization in different stages. Furthermore, the spatial statistics were used to identify the priority sites. The results showed that 68.78% of the grids had changed their ES bundles in terms of their quantities, types, and sites in Shenzhen during 1978-2018. The urbanization driver spatially shifts from provision of service to regulation and cultural ecosystem services and significantly negatively influences the composition and structure of the ES bundles in different urbanization stages. 1196 of the 1 square kilometer grids, which accounted for 54.17%, were identified to prioritize for ecological restoration in Shenzhen. However, only 4.08% of them need to set as the key ecological restoration site. This study explored an effectively spatial way to implement ecological restoration planning in a rapidly urbanized area.

How does the local-scale relationship between ecosystem services and human wellbeing vary across broad regions?

Recent studies have shown that the relationships between ecosystem services (ES) and human wellbeing (HWB) can be positive, negative, or non-existent, but the underlying causes and processes remain unclear. This study aimed to investigate how and why the local level ES-HWB relationship would change geospatially and manifest on broad regions. Using data for Mainland China, we first calculated seven ES and Human Development Index (an indicator of HWB), then used geographically weighted regression and cluster analysis to quantify the county-level ES-HWB relationship, and finally adopted Wilcoxon test and random forest to investigate key influencing factors. We found that (1) the local-scale relationship between ES and HWB exhibited a great deal of spatial heterogeneity, varying from positive to negative or no correlations across broad regions; (2) the varying relationships merged spatially into three general types of regions: Positive Correlation-Dominant Region, Negative Correlation-Dominant Region, and No Correlation-Dominant Region; and (3) the variations and spatial patterns of the ES-HWB relationships were influenced by a number of social-ecological factors (e.g., population density and land cover compositions), and generally corresponded to different stages of land use transition and socioeconomic development: a positive ES-HWB relationship was found mainly in socioeconomically underdeveloped (rural or agricultural) regions with low ES production levels; a negative ES-HWB relationship occurred mostly in intermediately developed regions with abundant non-food ES; and ES and HWB had no relationships in socioeconomically well-developed (intensive agriculture/urbanized) societies with ample provisioning ES. These findings suggest that neither the "environmentalist's paradox" nor the "environmentalist's expectation" adequately accounts for the complexity of the ES-HWB relationship.

Response of Ecosystem Health to Land Use Changes and Landscape Patterns in the Karst Mountainous Regions of Southwest China

The quantitative assessment of ecosystem health is important for interpreting the ecological effects of land use changes and formulating effective measures of sustainable ecological development by policymakers. This study investigated the response of ecosystem health to land use changes and landscape patterns in the karst mountainous regions of southwest China by taking Guiyang City as a case study area and assessing the spatial and temporal changes in ecosystem health from 2008 to 2017 using the vigor–organization–resilience model; it analyzed the influence of land use changes and landscape patterns on ecosystem health using spatial overlay analysis, the Dunnett’s T3 test, and the Spearman correlation analysis. The results show that the land use structure dramatically changed, with a trend of a sharp decrement of farmland and rapid increment of forestland and construction land due to rapid urbanization and ecologization. The overall ecosystem health was at a relatively strong level, with the average value greater than 0.6. The deterioration of ecosystem health was attributed to the expansion of construction land and farmland and the degradation of forestland, while the increment of forestland was the major contributor to the improvement of ecosystem health. The ecosystem health of the forestland + farmland landscape was significantly superior to that of forestland + construction land and construction land + farmland landscapes. Moreover, each landscape configurations had a significant positive or negative correlation with the ecosystem health. This study provides a valuable reference for formulating sustainable environmental management strategies in karst mountainous regions in China.

Drivers and constraints of land use transitions on Western grasslands: insights from a California mountain ranching community

CONTEXT

Land use change drives a host of sustainability challenges on Earth's grasslands. To understand the relationship between changing land use patterns, human well-being, and ecosystem services, research is needed into land use transitions on privately-owned grasslands. Such inquiry lies at the intersection of land system science, landscape sustainability science and environmental governance.

OBJECTIVES

This study investigated land use change in a mountain ranching community in the Sierra Nevada, California. The research objective was to highlight factors influencing land use transitions and corollary ecological outcomes on privately-owned grasslands in the Western US.

METHODS

This mixed methods case study integrated participant observation, 30 semi-structured interviews, and analysis of land cover and real estate data. Interviews were conducted with ranchers, public agencies, and conservation and real estate industry representatives, and analyzed with the constant comparison method using NVivo 12.

RESULTS

Land use transitions in the case study region include agricultural intensification, residential and solar development, and disintensification. These transitions were influenced by many factors including decreasing land access and water availability, amenity migration, intergenerational succession, and conservation policy.

CONCLUSIONS

By highlighting factors influencing land use transitions on working lands, this study can be applied to improve the uptake of environmental policies. For the future, several approaches may support grasslands conservation: ensuring grazing lands access, income diversification, groundwater regulations, agriculture-compatible conservation easements, and land use policies supporting ownership transition to amenity purposes rather than low-density residential development.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-021-01385-6.

A legendary landscape in peril: Land use and land cover change and environmental impacts in the Wulagai River Basin, Inner Mongolia

The Mongolian Plateau, home to the world's largest contiguous temperate grasslands, has been known for its vast steppe landscapes and legendary history of the Mongol Empire. However, like temperate grasslands elsewhere around the world, the Mongolian steppe landscapes have been severely degraded by increasing human activities during the past several decades. The main objective of this study was to assess the landscape and ecosystem changes in the Wulagai River Basin (WRB) in Inner Mongolia, where China's last intact steppe ecosystem reportedly resides. Using remote sensing data and landscape metrics, we found that, during 1979-2016, WRB lost about 55 % of wetlands, 76 % of shrublands, and 46 % of sandy-land vegetation, with its most dominant vegetation type shifting from meadow steppe to dry steppe for the first time in history. Human land uses continued to intensify: cropland expanded by about 40 %; impervious surface area increased by almost 34 times; and surface coal mining rampaged through the heartland, tearing up vegetation and sucking up water near and far. The WRB landscape became more diverse compositionally (increasing land cover types), more fragmented ecologically (habitat loss and isolation), and more complex geometrically (anthropogenic and natural landscape elements entangled). Damming, mining, and overgrazing were the major direct drivers for the observed environmental changes. Government-sponsored restoration programs have had positive ecological changes across China, but landscape destruction and fragmentation in the Wulagai River Basin have continued. This dire situation demands urgent government policy intervention and stakeholder-involved governance actions to promote the sustainability of this legendary landscape.

Zooscape ecology: a conceptual analysis of zoos and landscape ecology

CONTEXT

Zoos are a unique landscape with fascinating connections to the principles of landscape ecology. These 'zooscapes' have a focus on managing wild species.

OBJECTIVES

This article examines the multiple scales of zoos as urban green spaces, exhibit landscapes, and resources for resilience. I identify that landscape ecology can inform zoo evolution and note how zoos may provide a novel research site for landscape ecology.

METHODS

I provide a brief history of American zoos and insight into lingering questions within zoos, including their representations of animals and humans. Additionally, I note conceptual overlap between zoo design/function and landscape ecology literature.

RESULTS

Zoos provide habitat for native species and valued cultural ecosystem services. Zoo exhibits developed a landscape focus as modern landscape ecology emerged in the 1980s. Patches, corridors, and matrices exist within a zoo, and these facilities have value for the genetic support of fragmented populations. Zoos' strategies for disease management are increasingly relevant for global health. Simultaneously, zoos must exhibit sustainable landscapes, not just ecological simulacrums for threatened species.

CONCLUSIONS

Zoos must promote humanity's continued coexistence with other species. A landscape view is essential to achieving this goal. Zoos need to model sustainable landscapes of our present and future.