Sustainable land use in the managed landscape: Comparative, remote sensing and geo data based landscape assessment for transfer into regional environmental quality objectives

Abstract

This Contribution shall give an overview of the LABURNUM-Project logic. The LABURNUM Project is a regional case study as a contribution to the HGF Strategy Funds project „Sustainable Global Development - Perspectives for Germany. In the context of an integrated concept of sustainable development spatially explicit regional approaches have to be included. This applies with priority to intensively used and partially urbanized agrarian landscapes regarding water regime, soil fertility and yield protection, ecologically functional diversity of species and abiotic regularization functions. Main task of the Project is to check the sustainability of the land use - with help of quality objectives, -standards and indicator systems - on the basis of its adjustment degree to the guiding principle. In a comparative investigation of two middle European landscapes well-proven and new methods and concepts of landscape assessment and optimisation as well as indicator systems have to be tested and developed further regarding the sustainability of the current land use. The chosen regions (Eilenburger end moraines near Leipzig in Saxony and the Eider-Treene-Sorge lowlands in Schleswig-Holstein, both in Germany) have strong differences in land use intensity, land management and land use history in the passed decades. On the basis of normative specifications and an analysis and an evaluation of the actual condition of the regions scenarios for future land use options are defined and the effects of their conversion on the landscape-ecological functions are evaluated. The results then are used for the spatially explicit refinement of the guidelines. Functional and structural indicators, as well as indicators of the temporal dynamics, and their conversion to regional environment quality objectives play a relevant role in the concept. In figure 1 the methodology is schematically represented. The project is a cooperative action of the Environmental research centre Leipzig-Halle GmbH (UFZ) and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and has started in January 2001 and will be finished in December 2003.