Louise Willemen

University of Twente | UT · Department of Natural Resources (NRS)

Integrated landscape approaches (ILA) aim to reconcile multiple, often competing, interests across agriculture, nature conservation, and other land uses. Recognized ILA design principles provide guidance for their implementation, yet application remains challenging, and a strong performance evidence-base is yet to be formed. A comprehensive literat...

European viticultural landscapes not only support a significant share of rural livelihoods and cultural traditions, but also conserve biodiversity and sustain various ecosystem services. Winegrowers' practices of inter-row management (including whether to have vegetation in the inter-rows, type of vegetation, duration of vegetation cover, and soil...

Remnant natural forests act as a source of wild pollinators that are potentially relevant for crop pollination for sustaining the food production system of smallholder farms. In the Ethiopian highlands, sacred forests scattered within agricultural landscapes harbour wild pollinators. The contribution of wild pollinators to crop pollination services...

Participatory spatial tools—community mapping, PGIS, and others—find increasing resonance among research and non-governmental organizations to make stakeholder claims and community perspectives explicit for more inclusive landscape governance. In this paper, we situate the use of participatory spatial tools in debates on integrated landscape approa...

The Amazon rainforest covers roughly 40% of Colombia’s territory and has important global ecological functions. For more than 50 years, an internal war in the country has shaped this region. Peace negotiations between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) initiated in 2012 resulted in a progressive de-escalation of vi...

Reversing ecological degradation through restoration activities is a key societal challenge of the upcoming decade. However, lack of evidence on the effectiveness of restoration interventions leads to inconsistent, delayed, or poorly informed statements of success, hindering the wise allocation of resources, representing a missed opportunity to lea...

In this manuscript, we present a remote sensing-based method to evaluate the impact of ecological restoration interventions on the supply of ecosystem services covering a period of over 30 year at a spatial resolution of 30 x 30 m. We integrated the Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) design with Landsat images, and applied this to an arid rural lan...

Remote sensing opens opportunities to assess spatial patterns on ecological data for a wide range of ecosystems. This information can be used to more effectively design sampling strategies for fieldwork, either to capture the maximum spatial dependence related to the ecological data or to completely avoid it. The sampling design and the autocorrela...

The end of the first working program of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provided an opportunity to draw lessons from its work. This perspective paper captures insights from ecosystem services (ES) researchers and practitioners, largely drawing from the Europeancontext (referred to herein...

Landscape processes fluctuate over time, influencing the intra-annual dynamics of ecosystem services. However, current ecosystem service assessments generally do not account for such changes. This study argues that information on the dynamics of ecosystem services is essential for understanding and monitoring the impact of land management. We studi...

Considerable efforts and resources are being invested in integrated conservation and restoration interventions in rural arid areas. Empirical research for quantifying ecosystem services – nature’s benefits to people – is essential for evaluating the range of benefits of ecological restoration and to support its use in natural resource management. S...

>>>Free read-only version: https://rdcu.be/b1tMU <<< The assessment of land degradation and restoration by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that land degradation across the globe is a wide and severe issue and is showing no signs of slowing down. This trend must be halted and reversed.

The state of nature is driving human activities, while human activities change the state of nature. These social‐ecological interactions have existed for millennia. Now in the Anthropocene ‐the acclaimed geological era in which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment‐ many social‐ecological systems are under pressure...

FREE ACCESS TILL AUGUST 24 2019: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1ZLd27szSIup0a Agriculture sustainability standards and certification are increasingly used by the private sector and civil society to incentivize and support environmental conservation and improved rural. However, evidence of impact is limited by methodological challenges that hamper...

Landscape performance assessment is key for a constant and sustainable development of landscapes. A session at the Global Land Programm (GLP) Open Science Meeting gathered state of the art methods and approaches. Key lessons are brought to Agroforestry landscapes.

Ecosystems contribute to economic development through the supply of ecosystem services such as food and fresh water. Information on ecosystems and their services is required to support policy making, but this information is not captured in economic statistics. Ecosystem accounting has been developed to integrate ecosystems and ecosystem services in...

Restoration by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provides a critical analysis of the state of knowledge regarding the importance, drivers, status, and trends of terrestrial ecosystems. The Report recognizes that combatting land degradation, which is a pervasive, systemic phenomenon occurrin...

Spectral, temporal and spatial dimensions are difficult to model together when predicting in situ plant traits from remote sensing data. Therefore, machine learning algorithms solely based on spectral dimensions are often used as predictors, even when there is a strong effect of spatial or temporal autocorrelation in the data. A significant reducti...

Land Degradation and Restoration assessment report, Summary for Policymakers, approved, March 2018

Economic development has increased pressures on natural resources during the last decades. The concept of planetary boundaries has been developed to propose limits on human activities based on earth processes and ecological thresholds. However, this concept was not developed to downscale planetary boundaries to sub-global level. The absence of boun...

Ecosystem services (ES) mapping is becoming mainstream in many sustainability assessments, but its impact on real world decision-making is still limited. Robustness, end-user relevance and transparency have been identified as key attributes needed for effective ES mapping. However, these requirements are not always met due to multiple challenges, r...

The TEEBAgriFood ‘Scientific and Economic Foundations’ report addresses the core theoretical issues and controversies underpinning the evaluation of the nexus between the agri-food sector, biodiversity and ecosystem services and externalities including human health impacts from agriculture on a global scale. It argues the need for a ‘systems thinki...

Achieving well-being for all, while protecting the environment, is one of the most pressing global challenges of our time, and a central idea in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We believe that integrating ecosystem services, the benefits nature provides to people, into strategies for meeting the SDGs can help achieve this. Many develop...

The 2014 Indonesian National Energy Policy has set a target to provide national primary energy usage reached 2.500 kWh per capita in the year 2025 and reached 7.000 kWh in the year 2050. The National Energy Policy state that the development of energy should consider the balance of energy economic values, energy supply security, and the conservation...

The growing number of narrow spectral bands in hyperspectral remote sensing improves the capacity to describe and predict biological processes in ecosystems. But it also poses a challenge to fit empirical models based on such high dimensional data, which often contain correlated and noisy predictors. As sample sizes, to train and validate empirical...

Land degradation response actions need motivated stakeholders and investments to improve land management. In this study we present methods to prioritise locations for degradation mitigation investments based on stakeholder preferences for ecosystem services. We combine participatory and spatial modelling approaches and apply these for Zambia, South...

The 2014 Indonesian National Energy Policy has set a target to provide national primary energy usage reached 2.500 kWh per capita in the year 2025 and reached 7.000 kWh in the year 2050. The National Energy Policy state that the development of energy should consider the balance of energy economic values, energy supply security, and the conservation...

http://ab.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=12837&display_type=list&element_type=9

Section 7.9 E-book: https://ab.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=12837&display_type=list&element_type=1

Sustainable Development Goals offer an opportunity to improve human well-being while conserving natural resources. Ecosystem services highlight human well-being benefits ecosystems, including agricultural ecosystems, provides. Whereas agricultural systems produce the majority of our food, they drive significant environmental degradation. This tensi...

Cultural ecosystem services are defined by people's perception of the environment, which make them hard to quantify systematically. Methods to describe cultural benefits from ecosystems typically include resource-demanding survey techniques, which are not suitable to assess cultural ecosystem services for large areas. In this paper we explore a met...

Plurality in ecosystem service definitions and applications has resulted in a wide variety of methods to assess and map ecosystem services (ES). Although this helped the field to progress and evolve in several directions and contexts, this diversity challenges the mainstreaming of ES information into policy making, natural resource management and g...

A plurality in methods, models, terminologies is used to assess, quantify, map and communicate ecosystem services (ES). The Thematic Working Groups on Mapping (TWG4) and Modeling ES (TWG5) of the Ecosystem Service Partnership (ESP), recent literature and expert workshops, have highlighted the need for developing a platform that systematically organ...

Case studies / Decision making / Monitoring / Impact assessment / Planning / Soil conservation / Farmers / Stakeholders / Investment / Income / Public health / Nutrition / Food security / Poverty / Living standards / Rural areas / Communities / Sustainability / Governance / Rice / Productivity / Agroecosystems / Landscape / Agriculture / Ecosystem...

Ecoagriculture is an approach to managing landscapes for the simultaneous and synergistic achievement of three sets of outcomes: maintaining, increasing, or improving agricultural production; promoting biodiversity and ecosystem services; and enhancing human livelihoods and well-being. These elements are stitched together by institutions that suppo...

Taking Tree-based Ecosystem Approaches to Scale: Evidence of drivers and impacts on food security, climate change resilience and carbon sequestration. Ecoagriculture Discussion Paper No. 11. Washington, DC. EcoAgriculture Partners.

This report summarizes current knowledge at the Joint Research Centre regarding Renewable Energy in Africa. It assesses current energy consumption and the share of renewables in African states, and attempts to estimate the technical potential of available resources of solar, wind, biomass and hydropower which could be economically used to provide e...

Indicators for mapping ecosystem services: a review

a b s t r a c t Scientific work on ecosystem services has been growing globally as well as in Africa. Human dependence on provisioning ecosystem services in particular is mostly acknowledged in developing countries like those in Africa, where many people are poor and reliant on natural resources. The reliance of communities on natural resources in...

Mainstreaming ecosystem services into policy and decision making is dependent on the availability of spatially explicit information on the state and trends of ecosystems and their services. In particular, the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 addresses the need to account for ecosystem services through biophysical mapping and valuation. This paper...

Shifting societal needs drive and shape landscapes and the provision of their services. This paper presents a modelling approach to visualize the regional spatial and temporal dynamics in landscape service supply as a function of changing landscapes and societal demand. This changing demand can result from different policy targets. In this paper we...

During the symposium "Ecosystem Services at the Landscape Scale" from the EU-IALE conference 2009, several challenges for future research on approaches to use the concept of ecosystem services at the landscape scale were identified, focussing on the need for integration. Three main research directions were discussed, (i) the definition of the poten...

Rural landscapes are often multifunctional, meaning that at one single location different goods and services are being provided. Multifunctionality is spatially heterogeneous as not all areas are equally suitable to supply multiple goods and services. This suitability depends on favourable biophysical and socio-economic conditions and interactions...

Despite the growing body of literature on ecosystem services, still many challenges remain to structurally integrate ecosystem services in landscape planning, management and design. This paper therefore aims to provide an overview of the challenges involved in applying ecosystem service assessment and valuation to environmental management and discu...

In this paper we analyse the potential impact of an integrated policy package for the Gelderse Vallei region in the Netherlands on seven landscape services (residential use, intensive livestock husbandry, drinking water supply, attractiveness for overnight tourism, habitat provision for rare, endemic and indicator plant species, arable agricultural...

De maatschappij profiteert van een grote verscheidenheid van diensten die door het landschap geleverd worden. Deze zogenaamde ‘landschapsdiensten’ omvatten onder andere de productie van voedsel en hout, de levering van drinkwater, klimaatregulatie, landschapsbeleving en recreatiemogelijkheden. Landschapsdiensten zijn ongelijk verdeeld over het land...

Land cover change has always had a central role in land change science. This central role is largely the result of the possibilities to map and characterize land cover based on observations and remote sensing. This paper argues that more attention should be given to land use and land functions and linkages between these. Consideration of land funct...

In order to understand the state of conservation and use of forest genetic resources in Latin America, an on-line survey of forestry personnel and organizations was conducted in 2006. Most respondents work on forestry, agroforestry and human-resource development, at national government organizations and universities. Research is local and focuses o...

There is little information available on the spatial variation of landscape functions. We developed a methodological framework to map and quantify landscape functions depending on the availability of spatial information. In this framework three different methods were proposed (1) linking landscape functions to land cover or policy defined areas, (2...

Vasconcellea species, often referred to as highland papayas, consist of a group of fruit species that are closely related to the common papaya (Carica papaya). The genus deserves special attention as a number of species show potential as raw material in the tropical fruit industry, fresh or in processed products, or as genetic resources in papaya b...

Vasconcellea species, often referred to as highland papayas, consist of a group of fruit species that are closely related to the common papaya (Carica papaya). The genus deserves special attention as a number of species show potential as raw material in the tropical fruit industry, fresh or in processed products, or as genetic resources in papaya b...

This study evaluates quantitatively the suitability of the use of site-specific socio-economic and environmental data as indicators to rapidly assess patterns of diversity and genetic erosion risk in cassava. Socio-economic data as well as farmers’ estimation of genetic erosion were collected in the study area, the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Am...

For understanding the causes and effects of changes in land use it is critical to study the interaction between the temporal dynamics and the spatial pattern of land use. Interactions arise from feedbacks in the human-environment system, heterogeneity in the biophysical and human environment and the influence of land-use history. Land- use simulati...

This report describes simulations of near-future land use changes with the CLUE-S (Conversion of land use changes and its Effects at Small regional extent) modelling framework for Bac Kan province in Vietnam. CLUE-S consists of a spatial and non-spatial component in which spatial relations between land use and its driving factors as well as scenari...