a b s t r a c tThis paper explores which physical landscape components relate to subjective landscape dimensions. The ways in which people describe their surrounding cultural landscape was analyzed through an assessment of their representations of it. A special focus was placed on assessing the role of land cover as a means to communicate landscape meanings regarding a specific geographical region. The methodological framework was built on the basis of a questionnaire survey, multivariate statistical analysis and mapping approaches. This research shows that there is a set of physical landscape components that relate to subjective landscape dimensions which can be disclosed through the assessment of social representations. Enhancing and safeguarding those physical landscape components associated with the subjective landscape dimensions are important aspects in both framing and targeting land cover/use policies and decision making. Results also suggest that land cover can be understood as an important asset for describing landscapes as more than 30% of respondents referred to it when asked to represent the case study region of Alentejo in southern Portugal. This might mean that in addition to objective ecological and biological functions, land cover is also an important asset for evaluating subjective landscape dimensions in line with place attachment and landscape identity. Finally, the ways in which the empirical material gathered here can be used to inform policy and planning are explored.

Abstract:Landscape is defined by the European Landscape Convention as "an area perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors".Many efforts have been devoted in addressing the core concepts on which this definition roots: perception and interaction of men and nature, but when coming to large (continental) scale assessments, the latter prevail on the former. This paper aims at presenting a framework for a measurable landscape awareness indicator as a key link to the public demand for a specific type of landscape: the agricultural landscape. This is a necessary effort to complement more physically based assessments, which include as well the impact of human activities on landscapes.The analysis is carried out at different levels of governance: EU and regional, using an example from the Alentejo region in Portugal and EU wide databases, and addresses conceptual and practical questions: what type of societal landscape awareness can be monitored and by whom (e.g., individuals, specific social groups, society as a whole); what are the landscape dimensions that should be assessed; what are the limitations imposed by data-related constraints. By applying the methodology to build composite indicators to map landscape societal awareness, the paper shows the regional and local meaning of indicator approaches developed at European level, presents developments for downscaling to regional level, while introducing the social component to support sound policy development for European rural landscapes.

Abstrats:There is increasing recognition that agricultural landscapes meet multiple societal needs and demands beyond provision of economic and environmental goods and services. Accordingly, there have been significant calls for the inclusion of societal, amenity and cultural values in agri-environmental landscape indicators to assist policy makers in monitoring the wider impacts of land-based policies. However, capturing the amenity and cultural values that rural agrarian areas provide, by use of such indicators, resents significant challenges. The EU social awareness of landscape indicator represents a new class of generalized social indicator using a top-down methodology to capture the social dimensions of land-scape without reference to the specific structural and cultural characteristics of individual landscapes. This paper reviews this indicator in the context of existing agri-environmental indicators and their differing design concepts. Using a stakeholder consultation approach in five case study regions, the potential and limitations of the indicator are evaluated, with a particular focus on its perceived meaning, utility and performance in the context of different user groups and at different geographical scales. This analysis supplements previous EU-wide assessments, through regional scale assessment of the limitations and potentialities of the indicator and the need for further data collection. The evaluation finds that the perceived meaning of the indicator does not vary with scale, but in common with all mapped indicators, the usefulness of the indicator, to different user groups, does change with scale of presentation. This indicator is viewed as most useful when presented at the scale of governance at which end users operate. The relevance of the different sub-components of the indicator are also found to vary across regions

In recent decades, rural Europe has experienced major transitions, impelled by multiple drivers at varying scales, leading to increasingly differentiated modes of rural occupance. There is a need to monitor the multiple forces driving these transitions, so as to ensure that rural support and development policies are well targeted. In this paper, we develop a methodology which recognizes and regionalizes the three dimensions underlying rural multifunctionality, namely production, consumption and protection as initially conceptualized by Holmes (2006Holmes ( , 2012. In our approach, these three dimensions are linked to socio-economic dynamics, which vary across space and may act as a stimulus or a constraint on the multifunctional transition. For the municipalities in Alentejo, southern Portugal, we construct an appropriate set of indicators for conveying the four (production, protection, consumption and socio-economic) dimensions studied. Results show that with a robust set of spatial indicators the different dimensions by Holmes were gauged across the case study area. Further, results also highlight the advantages of crosschecking the production, protection and consumption dimensions with a fourth socio-economic dimension in order to comprehsively explore the possible ways in wich policy targetting can be made. This method can be a valuable tool to inform policy targetting and decision-making, including those of potential investors. Future research pathways are delineated in order to refine the employed indicator set and to include other possible dimensions and analytical techniques into this innovative methodological framework.