Janina Kleemann

Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg | MLU · Sustainable Landscape Development

Rural communities in Ghana, dependent on agriculture and lacking resources and infrastructure, are highly vulnerable to climate and environmental change. Internal migration is often considered as a strategy to mitigate local livelihood constraints. Understanding the challenges of rural communities requires knowledge of local conditions. As only few...

Peri-urban landscapes are transitional areas between urban and rural areas that are constantly changing. They are characterised by land use mixes and land cover changes, leading to significant changes in wildlife habitats. These changes, combined with an increasing anthropogenic presence, turn peri-urban landscapes into arenas of intensified human-...

The aim of the COST Action project DSS4ES is to establish a European research network for evaluating decision support systems to improve sustainable forest management and planning at landscape scale, considering various ecosystem services and products. More than 70 scientists across Europe are already involved. You can also apply for membership in...

Increasing land use and land cover change and climate change have considerable impacts on urban green spaces and their ecosystem services. These impacts result in a loss of urban green space and particularly weaken the climate resilience of urban populations. Landsat imagery data from 1990 to 2020 were used to track the spatio-temporal dynamics of...

Urbanization is a global trend which is taking place at the costs of agricultural, forest, and other natural or semi-natural areas. As a result of urbanization, transitioning zones in urban peripheries located between urban and rural areas have a mixed character from a spatial, ecological, socio-demographic, and economic point of view. Different la...

The food supply and the consumption of resources are already central challenges for the growing world population and increasing demands. Urban areas in particular face problems of resilience and sustainability. The development of alternative food systems by, e.g., urban gardening, can contribute to meet targets of sustainable consumption, inclusive...

The Niger Delta belongs to the largest swamp and mangrove forests in the world hosting many endemic and endangered species. Therefore, its conservation should be of highest priority. However, the Niger Delta is confronted with overexploitation, deforestation and pollution to a large extent. In particular, oil spills threaten the biodiversity, ecosy...

Migration in West Africa has been taking place for centuries for different reasons. Many dimensions of migration remain insufficiently documented and poorly understood. In particular, factors of migration in destination areas and areas of origin are still lacking comprehensive analysis. In this paper, we bring a new perspective to the model of push...

Natural ecosystems are declining and fragmenting globally at unprecedented rates. Fragmentation of natural ecosystems leads to decline in functions and services with severe impact on people. In Ecuador, despite establishment of the nationwide ecosystem classification, this baseline information has not been fully exploited to generate a monitoring s...

Forest conservation is of particular concern in tropical regions where a large refuge of biodiversity is still existing. These areas are threatened by deforestation, forest degradation and fragmentation. Especially, pressures of anthropogenic activities adjacent to these areas significantly influence conservation effectiveness. Ecuador was chosen a...

Ecuador belongs to the megadiverse countries of the world. However, the high diversity in species, ecosystems and their services are under threat by land use changes, invasive species, overexploitation, pollution and climate change. There is a need to monitor, manage, protect and improve biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) in Ecuador; however...

Peri-urbanisation is a dynamic process consisting primarily of the expansion of artificial areas into natural, semi-natural, and agricultural areas. This process reduces peri-urban open spaces, thus it is threatening peri-urban biodiversity and hampers the provision of ecosystem services. In this manuscript, we introduced the concept of peri-urban...

In West Africa, where the majority of the population relies on natural resources and rain-fed agriculture, regionally adapted agricultural land-use planning is increasingly important to cope with growing demand for land-use products and intensifying climate variability. As an approach to identify effective future land-use strategies, this study app...

World ecosystems are suffering from anthropogenic and natural pressure. The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) has developed analogous criteria for the Red List of Threatened Species in order to perform similar risk assessments on ecosystems, creating the Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) methodology. One of the most significant chall...

Land as an essential resource is becoming increasingly scarce due to population growth. In the case of the Kenyan coast, population pressure causes land cover changes in the Arabuko Sokoke Forest, which is an important habitat for endangered species. Forest and bushland have been changed to agricultural land in order to provide livelihood for the r...

Despite a growing number of national-scale ecosystem service (ES) assessments, few studies consider the impacts of ES use and consumption beyond national or regional boundaries. Interregional ES flows-ecosystem services "imported" from and "exported" to other countries-are rarely analyzed and their importance for global sustainability is little kno...

Context Several case studies investigated the role of ecosystem services in participatory planning processes. However, no systematic study exists that cuts across a large number of empirical cases to identify the implications of using ecosystem services in participatory planning. Objectives This study explores the potential of the ecosystem servic...

An integrative perspective on assessing land use impacts requires the understanding of relationships between land use and the provision of ecosystem services. This study presents a stakeholder-based modeling approach to assess the potential impact of land use patterns and land use changes on ecosystem services in two districts of northern Ghana. Fi...

Urban ecosystem services (ES) contribute to the compensation of negative effects caused by cities by means of, for example, reducing air pollution and providing cooling effects during the summer time. In this study, an approach is described that combines the regional biotope and land use data set, hemeroby and the accessibility of open space in ord...

Against the background of climate change, current and future provision of ecosystem services (ES) will also change. The recording of current provision potentials and its development in future is important for adapted regional planning. ES assessments are frequently carried out in the context of expert-based surveys, which have, however, revealed li...

This document corresponds to the ECOPOTENTIAL deliverable D7.2 which is one of the expected outcomes from WP7 'Ecosystem Services' and is expected to convey the outcomes of Task 7.2 "Conceptual Framework for valuation of ecosystem services in PAs" of EU Horizon 2020 Project ECOPOTENTIAL: IMPROVING FUTURE ECOSYSTEM BENEFITS THROUGH EARTH OBSERVATIO...

The understanding of multiple effects by possible future development is essential for adapted land use planning. This study assessed the potential of land use scenarios for the provision of ecosystem services using local knowledge in two districts of northern Ghana. Local knowledge was gathered through surveys with extension officers, who are regar...

Model validation is a precondition for credibility and acceptance of a model. However, it appears that there is no scientific standard for validation of Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs). In this paper, we present a novel combination of BBN validation approaches. A set of qualitative and quantitative validation approaches for the BBN structure, the C...

Model validation is a precondition for credibility and acceptance of a model. However, it appears that there is no scientific standard for validation of Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs). In this paper, we present a novel combination of BBN validation approaches. A set of qualitative and quantitative validation approaches for the BBN structure, the C...

Food insecurity is still a major global concern. Population growth, poverty, climate variability, and low agricultural productivity, among others, are threatening food provision. Rural areas in West Africa are particularly vulnerable due to low financial and physical capacity and high dependency on agriculture. Programs to support food provision ex...

Agricultural landscapes in the EU are undergoing fundamental changes in land use, farm structure and management, and these in turn impose socio-economic and environmental impacts. It is often difficult to isolate the impacts of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) from other co-acting drivers, but a large number of studies attempt to do so. The lit...

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) is the result of complex human-environmental interactions. The high interdependencies in social-ecological systems make it difficult to identify the main drivers. However, knowledge of key drivers of LULCC, including indirect (underlying) drivers which cannot be easily determined by spatial or economic analyse...

Population growth, economic development, and rural migration to urban areas have caused rapid expansion of urban centres in Ghana. One reason is that spatial planning and in particular urban planning face different social, economic and political challenges which hinder a structured and planned urban development, therefore causing urban sprawl. We h...

This paper is a communication from the corresponding symposium at the Global Land Project Open Science Meeting, Berlin, March 2014. We explored the assumption that the ecosystem services-(ES) concept has the potential to support communication and collaboration between actors in land use planning. If true, the concept could facilitate collaborative...

The authors analyze the concept of marginality from an ecological perspective and provide examples of some mechanisms of marginalization. Marginalization cannot solely be described as an ecological phenomenon, but rather occurs via the interplay of ecological and social aspects of complex arrangements. Hence the use of socio-ecological systems as a...

High Nature Value farmland comprises not only semi-natural vegetation types, extensively used agricultural landscapes and landscape elements (or mosaics of these types), but also habitats of plant and animal species which use the agriculturally intensively used farmland and which are adapted to specific land management and farming practices. Among...