4 State of the research: Landscape and the Anthropocene

Landscape science has undertaken research into human impact on the landscape for centuries. Contemporary landscape scientists can build on this tradition to explore contemporary landscape changes associated with the Anthropocene debate. For example, the 19th century works of Lyell, Marsh and Stoppani and the 20th century work of Vemadsky and Le Roy all detail the domineering role of humans on landscapes (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). These scientists sensed the seriousness of human impact on the landscape in their respective times. According to Zalasiewicz et al. (2011), George Perkins Marsh raised concern in his Man and Nature (1864), while Antonio Stoppani coined the term Anthropozoic for landscape change; Svante Arrhenius and Thomas Chamberlain focused on increasing carbon concentrations. After World Wars I and II, scientists in Europe resuscitated the concept of noösphere, which stands for modifications to the earth system, referred to as the anthroposphere (Steffen et al., 2011). Although the scales of human impact vary in time and space, over the last 15 000 years, agriculture, energy and the export of raw materials remain the driving forces of land cover change (Armesto et al., 2010).

Ayestaran (2008) suggests that dealing with the challenges associated with the proposed Anthropocene should not be restricted to the sciences. Ethical, moral and philosophical considerations are also relevant. Massari (2010) and Tickell (2011) propose that political and social options are needed in addition to the technological solutions for tackling anthropocenic challenges. Thus, Anthropocene research ought to be transdisciplinary in nature. Hence it is essential to couple human, natural sciences and policy issues. Researchers use many tools and approaches, ranging from integrated land use models, coupled human and natural system, simulations and landscape metrics to investigate the physical, planning and management aspects of the landscape (Mitchell, 2006; Schaldach and Priess, 2008; Uuemaa et al., 2009; Haase and Schwarz, 2009; Jenerette and Potere, 2010). Apart from involving scientists, the Anthropocene debate also attracts the attention of the mass media. Several top global media – e.g., The Economist (2011), The New York Times (2011), Der Spiegel (Zalasiewicz, 2011), and the BBC (Falcon-Lang, 2011) – have addressed the Anthropocene debate.

To gain an overview of the current state of landscape research, we searched key science publication databases, namely the Web of Knowledge and Scopus. We extracted relevant publications on landscape and the Anthropocene from these sources. This method is common for landscape review articles (Meeus and Gulinck, 2008). Table 3 below reveals trends in Anthropocene and landscape research for the period from 1990 to 2011. Apparently, landscape research has grown extensively over the period compared to the Anthropocene. The former has generated in the region of tens of thousands of publications, while the latter has produced less than 200 peer-reviewed publications. The limitation of using this method is that only the most recent articles were retrievable. Many printed journals from the past were not included in these online databases.