Governance, Values, and Conservation Processes in Multifunctional Landscapes

Dear Colleagues,

Given the global and regional rates of biodiversity loss and the related processes of land use and land cover change, researchers and practitioners must explore both localized case studies and broader, more generalizable patterns to effectively leverage the best practices to reverse these trends. Thus, for this Special Issue of Land, we are seeking the submission of manuscripts that link landscape-scale conservation with relevant governance structures, approaches, and strategies to address the challenge of reconciling context-dependent relational values with global conservation imperatives (e.g., Table 2, Allen et al., 2019). In particular, we are seeking papers that consider the ways that governance, policy, and values interact and promote multifunctional landscapes that foster social-ecological integrity, thus contributing to biodiversity conservation.

In this thematic Special Issue, landscape conservation provides an interesting spatial extent for observing generalizable ecological terrestrial and aquatic processes while still providing the granularity to understand the local context. The diversity of human value systems that shape policy and governance structures, combined with the call to understand these value systems as relational, and context-dependent (IBPES), necessitates the understanding of research done at a landscape scale. The understanding and promotion of a spectrum of relational values may provide additional policy alternatives that result in an increased ability to meet conservation goals locally, regionally, and globally.

For this Special Issue, we invite papers focusing on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Landscape-scale governance to link terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity conservation initiatives;
• Relational values and landscape conservation;
• Processes for decision making in landscape conservation;
• Evaluation of policy outcomes and impacts on landscape conservation;
• Metrics for understanding multifunctional landscapes;
• Nature’s contributions to people at landscape scales.

[1] Allen, K. Quinn, C., English, C., and Quinn J.E. 2018. Relational values in agroecosystem governance. Curr. Opin. Environ. Sust. 2018, 35, 108–115, doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2018.10.026

Guest Editors

Dr. John E. Quinn
Dr. Daniel Hanks
Dr. Karen Allen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.