Landscape Evaluation as a Complementary Tool in Environmental Assessment. Study Case in Urban Areas: Salamanca (Spain)

Marco Criado, Antonio Martínez-Graña, Fernando Santos-Francés and Leticia Merchán
Additional contact information
Marco Criado: Department of Soil Sciences, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, University of Salamanca, 37007 Salamanca, Spain
Antonio Martínez-Graña: Department of Geology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Salamanca, 37008 Salamanca, Spain
Fernando Santos-Francés: Department of Soil Sciences, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, University of Salamanca, 37007 Salamanca, Spain
Leticia Merchán: Department of Soil Sciences, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, University of Salamanca, 37007 Salamanca, Spain

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 16, 1-22

Abstract: In recent years, the landscape has become another environmental resource, so it is important to incorporate it into planning actions. However, its broad sense of study has made it difficult to develop methodologies that precisely diagnose the state of the landscape and its management requirements, especially in dynamic spaces like urban areas. In order to develop a method capable of providing information that can be incorporated into environmental assessment and territorial planning tasks so that the needs of the landscape are taken into account in the decision-making stages, an objective methodology is presented based on the study of different parameters (biotic, abiotic and socioeconomic) analyzed in the field and subsequently geoprocessed through Geographic Information Systems according to their influence on the landscape. Through the proposed methodology it is possible to determine the quality, fragility and need of protection of the landscape, as well as to identify the diverse landscape units that form the landscape of a territory. Based on these results, a landscape diagnosis can be drawn up to quantify its overall and partial state, carry out monitoring analyses and make comparisons between different landscape units, so that management measures can be adopted according to the obtained scenarios.

Keywords: landscape; landscape quality; landscape fragility, need of protection; landscape diagnosis; GIS; environmental assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6395/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6395/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:16:p:6395-:d:396353

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().