Scale considerations in landscape approaches

Scale can be a key determinant in understanding, planning and managing landscapes.
Stakeholders in a landscape will perceive the same differently, given their specific
interests. Wilbanks (2006) shows that the choice of scale could determine how much detail
of the landscape can be revealed, with detail observed at finer scales. Therefore, several
landscape practitioners have asked the question, what is the right/appropriate landscape
scale? Common answers are often along the following lines “it depends”, “it depends
on context”, “it depends on the problem”, “it depends on the system being analyzed”,
etc. Is “it depends” a cop-out or is it the fact that there is no straightforward answer? In
this chapter, we review how scale has been interpreted and deployed in landscapes and
highlight salient considerations for analyzing, understanding and facilitating landscape
processes in the context of landscape approaches to sustainable landscapes