The Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC), established in 2009 in the United States, are a network of 22 regional conservation bodies covering the entire United States and adjacent areas. They are autonomous cooperatives sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior and aim to develop coordinated conservation strategies applicable to large areas of land. Partnerships are formed with government and non-government conservation organizations to achieve common goals of conservation. While fairly new as government supported entities, the LCCs are similar to initiatives that have been started or advocated in other countries.
Description In response to rapid changes in large land and marine landscapes, uncertain environmental and social changes, conservation organizations need to overcome barriers to cooperation. These conservation organizations need to build governance structures, combine ecological, biological and physical sciences with social science insights, and the incorporation of new information to become capable of achieving the combined LCC goals. In some cases, LCCs cross borders and differing goals need to be accommodated by multiple LCCs and other conservation entities. Governance of the LCCs has been a barrier to their successful implementation in the United States. It has been suggested that the Adaptive Common Governance Framework, a social network supported by differing conservation stakeholders will provide the platform for building relationships, enhancing stakeholder engagement, allowing the potential partnering entities to create a working environment of adaptive co-governance. As an example, Rural credit cooperatives are a network of government and non-government protection organizations that promote the protection of rapidly changing social ecosystems by providing the structure and incentives for collaboration and shared learning.
Modern landscape planning and design coordinates the relationship between people and nature in the process of human development, social progress and natural evolution. Landscape planning research covers topics such as land development, land use, and environmental quality. Troll proposed the concept of "landscape ecology." The landscape was viewed as "the whole of the space and everything that the vision touches in the human living environment." Buchwald believes that the so-called landscape can be understood as a comprehensive feature of a certain space on the surface. Egler proposed the concept of total human ecosystem. Dansereau advocates the use of "human ecology" to study the impact of humans on the landscape. McHarg proposed to use the entire human ecosystem as a target for landscape ecology and landscape ecological planning. The process of landscape planning is to help people living in natural systems or using the resources in the system to find the most appropriate route (McHarg, 1969). It is a plan based on ecological theory and knowledge (Sedon, 1986, Leita and Ahern, 2002). Landscape ecology considers the lithosphere, biosphere and wisdom circle in the human living space as an integral part of the overall human ecosystem, and studies the structural and functional relationships between the various landscape elements (relatively homogeneous ecosystems). Landscape ecology is the guiding theory of landscape ecological design. The landscape ecological design with the information society as the background is the process of human beings to actively arrange and coordinate the elements of the overall landscape (including natural and cultural). All elements of the landscape as a design variable and goal, ultimately optimize the landscape system structure and function. Landscape planning provides a comprehensive solution through close collaboration with spatial planning. Landscape planning has gradually expanded to the areas of river basin planning, regional planning, land planning, and ecological remediation and restoration. The objects directly faced by landscape planning have been extended to the land complex. Landscape planning is a material spatial plan with the overall goal of achieving sustainable landscapes or ecosystems through land and natural resource conservation and use planning. Landscape ecological planning has the following basic principles: natural priority principle, overall design principle, design adaptability principle and multidisciplinary comprehensive principle. Beta Langfi pointed out that "it is not only to study parts and processes in isolation, but also to study the interaction of various parts. The organism should be considered as a whole or system. Environmental protection requires systematic thinking. Landscape planning is required for overall planning.
Implementation Maintaining biodiversity by protecting a representative and well-connected habitat network in a managed landscape requires wisely protecting, managing, and restoring habitats on multiple scales. Scholars suggest that the integration of natural sciences and social sciences in the form of "two-dimensional gap analysis" is an effective tool for implementing biodiversity policies. The tool links biologically relevant "horizontal" ecological issues to "vertical" issues related to institutions and other social issues. Taking forest biodiversity as an example, it illustrates how to combine the ecological and institutional aspects of biodiversity conservation to promote environmentally sustainable regional development. In particular, people use regional gap analysis to identify local forest types and determine habitat modeling for "green infrastructure" functional connectivity as a tool for horizontal gap analysis. For the vertical dimension, it is suggested how to assess the success of social sciences in implementing biodiversity policies in real landscapes by identifying institutional barriers when implementing policies. It is believed that this interdisciplinary approach can be applied to a range of other environments, including other terrestrial biota and aquatic ecosystems, where functional habitat connectivity, non-linear response to habitat loss, and multiple economic and social benefits occur together in the same landscape.
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