Green Infrastructure at regional and local scale – Assessing connectivity and functionality through stakeholder involvement.

Description

Green Infrastructure (GI) is a key strategy in the European conservation and restoration policy aimed at reconnecting vital natural areas to urban hubs and restoring and improving their functional roles. MaGICLandscapes (ML) will operationalize the GI concept in Central Europe (CE) providing land-managers, policy makers and communities with the tools and the knowledge they need to ensure the persistence of GI functionality and consequent benefits to society, at different spatial levels.

Among nine multi-scale and multi-thematic case studies, the Austrian region “Eastern Waldviertel and Western Weinviertel” serves as a testing ground for our trans-disciplinary partner consortium to identify and feedback best practice for assessment, thus creating transnational added value.

In this work we develop and demonstrate GI assessment methods that focus on functionality in terms of connectivity and provision of landscape services and furthermore communicate and facilitate the adoption of those assessment methods by institutions through stakeholder involvement and participatory approaches.

Through a number of multi-thematic surveys the type and quality of GI elements was mapped exemplarily in the case study area in cooperation with regionally active institutions. Subsequently we combined morphological analysis of spatial patterns and distance to identify priority areas for interventions. The additional analysis of the landscape services (LS) supply offered by these GI elements may therefore complement the information basis for the sustainable planning of GI in the case study area.

The results will provide these planning and environmentally oriented institutions with information and methods with which planning policies and strategies can be produced that recognise landscape ecological functions and landscape services and identify opportunities for enhanced multifunctionality.

Period	4 Jul 2019
Event title	10th IALE World Congress: Nature and society facing the Anthropocene: challenges and perspectives for landscape ecology
Event type	Conference
Location	Milan, ItalyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International