Quantifying Landscape for Sustainable Land Use Planning

Dear Colleagues,

The landscape is a resource that determines the environmental quality and people's well-being at scales that are larger to be addressed by local, sectorial stakeholders. In this special issue, we first intend to outline the visual landscape analysis and its implications for sustainable land use planning strategies. Further, we intend to present recent methods, concepts and reviews which found their way to landscape aesthetics, citizen well-being, visual design in the landscape, urban space revitalizations as well as landscape co-design and public participation frameworks.

According to the European Landscape Convention (ELC-2000), landscape is an important component of people's lives, however, civilization development and land consumption pose a number of threats to this multi-dimensional resource. Thus, landscape and its physiognomy protection require a  land use planning which adopts an integrated socio-ecological-technological approach and carefully considers sustainable development goals (SDGs). Such an integrated, multi-faceted and holistic approach is believed to be able to address the diverse needs of multiple stakeholders and create landscapes that are ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable. Despite an increasing body of knowledge on landscape ecology (e.g. landscape diversity, connectivity), there is still a lack of research focusing on landscape analysis that helps quantify and characterize the visual landscape resources, specifically landscape physiognomy and visual character. Sustainable management and conservation of aforementioned visual resources, means ensuring the attainment and continued of human aesthetic needs, cultural identity and well-being for the present and future generations.

At this point, we would like to invite all authors whose research concerns landscape analysis with implications for sustainable land use planning. The special issue emphasises the visual landscape, landscape character assessment, landscape services, nature-based solutions which could be useful for decision making in the context of land use planning and sustainable cities development. We welcome all theoretical, methodological and practical (both qualitative and quantitative) research that examines landscape approaches to sustainable land use planning. Since geoinformatics and GeoWeb plays a key role in the landscape analysis, we especially welcome approaches incorporating GIS and remote sensing data into method workflow.  Regarding socio-ecological issues of the landscape, the crowdsourcing and citizen science as well as data mining approaches would be warmly welcomed too. We also encourage the discussion and reviews of legal solutions for landscape protection in accordance with ELC-2000 and SDGs.

We would like to invite colleagues to submit articles about their recent research on any of the following topics but not restricted to:

• landscape analysis
• sustainable land use planning and landscape management
• landscape services
• landscape character assessment and landscape units
• landscape visibility and visual impact assessment
• quantitative approaches to landscape design
• nature-based solutions
• edible landscape and urban agriculture
• effectiveness of revitalization strategies
• environmental, ecological and social impacts of land use planning
• urban and rural landscapes’ effects on individual and community health
• co-design and participatory mapping in landscape research
• applications of citizen science in landscape research and success stories with GeoWeb
• geoprocessing tools and algorithms for landscape analysis
• use of remote sensing data in landscape analysis
• the theory of landscape sustainability

Dr. Szymon Chmielewski
Dr. Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo
Dr. Mahyar Masoudi
Dr. Magdalena Szczepańska
Guest Editors

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