Investigating land dynamics: future research perspectives

Research on land dynamics still has many unresolved fundamental issues. A multi-scape system approach is presented that can serve as a simple qualitative framework to identify relevant issues. Land can appear in different realities as different phenomena, which are referred to as ‘scapes’. Because the land system is a coupled system there is a fundamental need for modelling feedback, which allows the system some degree of self-organization. Future land system states may be explored using model-based projections. It is argued that stakeholder perceptions of the relevant land system must be included to advance scenario development. This will also make it easy to make more explicit future goals in the scenario development and to incorporate the different ‘scape’ perspectives. It is argued based on the multi-scape system perspective that in order to come to acceptable and feasible future more explicit attention should be paid to land governance aspects.