Landscape scale planning: exploring alternative land use scenarios

Concerns regarding loss of species diversity in the wider countryside have focused attention on the inadequacies of conservation programmes based on site protection alone. Consequently, spatial land use strategies increasingly recognise the need to reinforce landscape features which support biodiversity and visual distinctiveness. Landscape ecology offers a basis for plan production for the wider countryside, though its gradual emergence as a scientific body of knowledge in different places to respond to different pressures has resulted in variations of interpretation and reservations about scientific coherence. This study takes three approaches to landscape ecological planning and applies them to a case study area in Nottinghamshire, UK, to assess their transferability to local conditions. The experimental plans are then subjected to scrutiny by panels of ecologists and planners. Whilst the landscape ecological approach to land use planning raises some problems of implementation, theoretical defensibility and biocentricity, it is generally welcomed as an inter-disciplinary means of responding to issues of rural dynamics.