Integrating landscape ecological principles and land evaluation forsustainable land use

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Integrating landscape ecological principles and land evaluation for sustainable land use

-- Many existing methods for appraisal of agriculturalareas and farming systems are short of dynamics and spatialanalysis. The main objective of this paper is to merge approachesin classical land evaluation, largely based on soil science, andnewer approaches in landscape ecology, which are rather based onthe relationships between spatial patterns (physiography, land useand farming system design, vegetation etc. ) and processes (farmingactivities, scale changes, geomorphological processes, bio-ecological processes). Rapid changes in rural areas have an impacton both processes and patterns. Planning for sustainable use ofthese areas should include the assessment of the interrelations between these patterns and processes.