Damaged landscapes

An interesting piece appeared over the weekend. In a paper in AAAS, a team of researchers has provided more detail on how damaged landscapes can still perform basic natural functions. The paper, "Coastal ecosystem-based management with non-linear ecological functions and values", looked at how some coastal ecosystems could support a limited amount of human use (or impact) and still perform much of their natural role.

As the world's population continues to crowd coastal zones, it is important that multidisciplinary approaches emerge for describing the impacts of the human footprint:

“Too often, poor ecological data lead to inaccurate valuation of these benefits, resulting frequently in an ‘all or none’ choice of either preserving or converting all coastal habitats to human use,” Barbier says. “This ‘all or none’ outcome is at odds with EBM strategies, which are trying to find acceptable compromises between conservation and development.”

It will be interesting to see if this becomes a more broadly understood idea, or just gets used as an excuse for developing sensitive landscape.