Decoding Spatial Quality of Agricultural Landscapes: A literature review

The European Landscape Convention (ELC) promotes actions to maintain or enhance the quality of European landscapes. Agricultural landscapes cover 38% of European land and face multiple spatial challenges, creating public concerns about their future quality. This also applies to the Netherlands, a country that signed the ELC and developed multiple policies to maintain and enhance spatial quality of landscapes. However, spatial quality can be an ambiguous concept, leading to miscommunication between stakeholders involved in the protection, management and planning of agricultural landscapes. To contribute to the communication of spatial quality, this literature review identified 18 aspects grouped into four dimensions of spatial quality: experiential, use, long-term and ecological quality. Based on these dimensions, we found that spatial quality is understood either as (1) ecological quality only, (2) experiential quality only, (3) the combination of experiential and ecological quality, and (4) the combination of all four dimensions. The consideration of all four dimensions allows the identification of synergies and trade-offs across spatial quality objectives, which is essential for the development of high quality agricultural landscapes.