Nature at Our Doorstep

As urban centers continue to densify, the vital green and blue spaces surrounding them, known as peri-urban landscapes, face increasing pressure to balance the demands of outdoor recreation with the necessity of biodiversity conservation. The Landscape Ecology Group (Dagmar Haase) addresses this challenge by providing a comprehensive framework for the design and stewardship of these complex areas. They conceptualizes peri-urban environments as evolving social-ecological systems where mega-scale stressors like climate change, urbanization, and food-energy production interact with societal factors and advanced data technologies. Furthermore, they propose ten essential priorities for the future, which include enhancing participatory knowledge, understanding the impacts of social media on nature-based activities, and supporting environmental justice to ensure that access to these landscapes remains equitable and safe for all. This work seeks to find a middle ground where human-wildlife conflict can transition into sustainable coexistence through climate-adapted and socially acceptable land-use strategies. If you are interested in peri-urban landscapes, read the Landscape Ecology Article.

Abstract

Context Peri-urban landscapes are increasingly expected to support both outdoor recreation and bio-diversity conservation. Different trade-offs and potential synergies between these two objectives call for a clear, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive framework for the design, management, and stewardship of such landscapes to better support outdoor recreation and biodiversity conservation.

Objectives The aim of this work was to explore the most important interdisciplinary priorities for advancing peri-urban recreation ecology research in relation to policy and practice, and provide a basis for investigating the interrelations among these priorities to assess compatibility and coherence.

Methods We designed and ran a session about the future of peri-urban recreation ecology, held in September 2024, at the 12th International Conference on Monitoring and Management of Visitors in Recreational and Protected Areas. In the session, we explored the most important limitations and opportunities in this field and identified ten priorities for the future. After the session, we continued the discussions virtually, from September 2024 to June 2025 and complemented them with a review of the recent
literature.

Results and Conclusion We propose ten priorities for the future: (1) conceptualizing a social-ecological system approach, (2) developing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework, (3) enhancing participatory and data-driven knowledge, (4) developing indicators, metrics and models, (5) measuring the impacts of urban-nature proximity, (6) developing site-specific land-use strategies, (7) understanding the impacts of social media, (8) building capacity for unforeseen changes, (9) improving sustainable multifunctionality, and (10) supporting environmental justice.