Conflicting 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 modeling techniques.

Research Questions

• Can the complexity of land use conflicts in the study area be reduced by means of creating a conflict typology?
• Can typical socioeconomic and biophysical variables associated with conflict types be identified?
• Can the information generated in Q2 be used to model the distribution of conflicting landscapes services?

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

• new methods for spatially explicit mapping of landscape services and
• new analytical tools for modeling 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 modeling techniques (neighborhood analysis, geographically weighted regression).

Study area

The study area extends across 29 consecutive municipalities, covering approx. 600 km2. The area is part of the Swiss Central Plains, an intensively used and densely populated cultural landscape. The study area is of genuine peri-urban character: it is favorable with commuters to the nearby urban agglomerations (Bern, Basel & Zürich), is crisscrossed by major transportation, and has most productive agricultural land. The area provides a large variety of land uses within a limited area and is thus particular prone to the eruption of land use conflicts.

Data Used

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.