Unit 1.1 What is the Landscape Measures approach?
Introduction Throughout the world, thousands of organizations and millions of land stewards are working to simultaneously produce food, conserve nature, and sustain rural livelihoods. However, it has proven difficult to measure changes and use the information to improve future decisions. Furthermore, as the state of our knowledge grows, we discover ever greater complexities and linkages [...]
Unit 1.2. Roots of the Landscape Measures Approach in Ecoagriculture
The Landscape Measures approach is rooted in Ecoagriculture. Ecoagriculture is an approach to landscape management that simultaneously advances three goals: 1) producing agricultural crops and livestock, and harvesting forest and fish resources on a sustainable basis, 2) supporting viable rural livelihoods, and 3) conserving native biodiversity and ecosystem services. A fourth goal is concerned with [...]
Unit 1.5 Getting Started in Landscape Assessment
Once you have decided that tracking your landscape’s performance in delivering production, conservation and livelihood benefits is worth trying, the next step in getting started is to begin forming a core team. The core team will assume responsibility for leading the effort, for bringing in specialized expertise when needed, and for engaging local and external [...]
Unit 1.4 Thinking and Working at Landscape Scale
Landscape is the scale at which many elements of biodiversity and ecosystem services are mediated, and the scale at which tradeoffs and synergies between production and conservation are likely to become apparent. This section discusses what a landscape approach means in practice. It identifies ways of thinking about landscape, implications for who should be involved [...]
Unit 1.3. Entry Points for assessing landscape level measures
Organizations and situations that may benefit from measuring landscape performance are many and varied. ‘Entry points’ are defined as the reasons different actors have for initiating an outcome measures activity’. It is useful to characterize prospective `entry points’ into landscape performance assessment to help anticipate how and by whom the process might be initiated and [...]
Unit 1. Landscape Measures Approach
Farmers and environmentalists are working together to manage the Skagit River Delta valley in western United States for agriculture and habitat for migrating birds. Photo: Kirsten Morse The material in the Landscape Measures Resource Center (LMRC) is selected, created and organized to support stakeholders in agricultural landscape mosaics to assess the performance of their landscapes [...]