Indicators to assess sustainable land development often focus on either economic or ecologic aspects of landscape use. The concept of multifunctional land use helps merging those two focuses by emphasising on the rule that economic action is per se accompanied by ecological utility: commodity outputs (CO, e.g., yields) are paid for on the market, but non-commodity outputs (NCO, e.g., landscape ...

In the fall of 2002, approximately sixty undergraduate students from a broad range of disciplines at Acadia University enrolled in an interdisciplinary course entitled Sustainable Nova Scotia. While the theoretical and practical implications of this pedagogical approach are to be discussed elsewhere, this paper focuses on one course project that tested the feasibility of the Rapid Management As...

There is a growing recognition that the present demographic patterns in sub-Saharan Africa, including Ghana, do not augur well for the achievement of sustainable development. Ghana is characterized by a youthful population, rapid population growth, uneven population distribution, high fertility, and rural-urban migration which has brought human numbers into collision with resources to sustain ...

Sustainability is a key challenge for humanity in the 21st century. Ecosystem services-the benefits that people derive from nature and natural capital-is a concept often used to help explain human reliance on nature and frame the decisions we make in terms of the ongoing value of nature to human wellbeing. Yet ecosystem service science has not always lived up to the promise of its potential. De...

State-sponsored research can be considered a key driver of sustainable environmental, social and economic development. In recognition of this fact, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science set up (in 1995) the ongoing “Sustainable Cultural Landscape Development” research (CLR) programme. Since its inception, this programme has been addressing current socio-economic and ecological issues in regi...

Relevant management decisions are directly subjected to our ability to characterize landscape pattern: the amount and arrangement of spatial variability. The primary objectives of our project were (1) to develop new exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) methods to evaluate and quantify landscape spatial heterogeneity across spatial scales, and (2) to assess the sensitivity of widely used lan...

Green space plays an important role in sustainable urban development and ecology by virtue of multiple environmental, recreational, and economic benefits. Constructing an effective and harmonious urban ecological network and maintaining a sustainable living environment in response to rapid urbanization are the key issues required to be resolved by landscape planners. In this paper, Nanchang Cit...

Landscape typologies are widely recognised as useful tools for landscape management and planning. However, there is wide range of different approaches producing diverse outputs, which makes the usage of landscape typologies sometimes difficult or confusing in general practice (Wascher ed., 2005). The same situation is found in the Czech Republic, where a number of holistic, expert–based and qua...

Although sustainable tourism concepts are gaining in importance everywhere, related research is quite fragmented with many studies concentrating on environmental sustainability. Seeking to contribute to the general discussion, we first examine the perceptions of sustainability among tourists using a best–worst scaling method applied to important aspects of sustainable tourism. Our results show ...

Ecotourism is a sub-component of the field of sustainable tourism. Ecotourism’s perceived potential as an effective tool for sustainable development is the main reason why developing countries are now embracing it and including it in their economic development and conservation strategies. Ecotourism, as an alternative tourism, involves visiting natural areas in order to learn, to study, or to c...