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PhD Project

 

Title
Conflicting landscape services – new approaches to spatially explicit modeling of landscape services
 

Purpose
Land use conflicts are the result of interactions between the social, economic and ecological realm of the human-environmental system. Recent publications also hypothesize land use conflicts to be the perceivable manifestations of conflicting landscape services. The purpose of this study is to test this hypothesis.  To achieve these results a combination of empirical fieldwork is employed together with exploratory multivariate statistical analysis and GIS modelling techniques.
 

Research Questions

Research Question 1: Can the complexity of land use conflicts in the study area be reduced by means of creating a conflict typology?

Research Question 2: Can typical socioeconomic and biophysical variables associated with conflict types be identified?

Research Question 3: Can the information generated in Q2 be used to model the distribution of areas vulnerable to land use conflicts?

 

Workflow
Step 1: development of a classification scheme of landscape services

Step 2: development of a typology of land use conflicts in a peri-urban landscape

Step 3: assessment of contextual biophysical and socioeconomic predictor variables for land use conflicts

Step 4: spatially explicit mapping of landscape services across the study area

Step 5: spatially explicit modelling of the conflict potential for the study area

 

Expected Results
The expected results will provide new methods and tools for practitioners and scientists working in the field of landscape planning. More precisely, the study is expected to deliver a) new methods for spatially explicit mapping of landscape services and b) new analytical tools for modelling the conflict potential at the local to regional scale.
 

Methods
To achieve these results a combination of empirical fieldwork is employed together with exploratory multivariate statistical analysis and GIS modelling techniques.
 

Data
The study’s primary empirical database is derived from a content analysis of the regions local newspaper. Where necessary, the media information is enriched with the study of official documents and expert interviews. Biophysical and socioeconomic variables, the study’s secondary data, are collected from national and regional statistical databases.
 

Products
The findings of this research project are going to be published in three research articles and one short discussion paper.
 

Timeline
Start: Fall 2008
End: Fall 2011
 
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