Making sense of breaks in landscape change.

Context: The paper studies the possibilities of how the cultural explosion theory and path dependence approach could be used for exploring landscape (change). The former is an approach (not theory) used in humanities and social sciences to study the processes that happen when culture changes rapidly-how new cultural processes are created and how the past ones are integrated or forgotten. The latter is an approach developed also in social sciences, mostly economy, to study how the current decisions are dependent on the past decisions. Objectives: To demonstrate the possibilities the two theoretical approaches might offer. Methods: We discuss the ways landscape change could be analysed using, first, cultural explosion theory and, second path dependence approach, and demonstrate this on the example of the post-Soviet military areas. Results: Both approaches are indeed useful in understanding landscape change. The demo case on military landscapes allows for distinguishing three different development paths for the future of the areas: set-aside, active use, and neglect. Similarly three different ways of relating with the past are found: ignorance and oblivion; acknowledging the past; and making use of the past. Conclusions: Landscapes have time boundaries and these two analytical tools in fact help us to navigate through these boundaries, understand better the trajectories of change and the importance (or the lack of it) of the past.

Global trends in nature's contributions to people.

Declining biodiversity and ecosystem functions put many of nature's contributions to people at risk. We review and synthesize the scientific literature to assess 50-y global trends across a broad range of nature's contributions. We distinguish among trends in potential and realized contributions of nature, as well as environmental conditions and the impacts of changes in nature on human quality of life. We find declining trends in the potential for nature to contribute in the majority of material, nonmaterial, and regulating contributions assessed. However, while the realized production of regulating contributions has decreased, realized production of agricultural and many material commodities has increased. Environmental declines negatively affect quality of life, but social adaptation and the availability of substitutes partially offset this decline for some of nature's contributions. Adaptation and substitutes, however, are often imperfect and come at some cost. For many of the contributions of nature, we find differing trends across different countries and regions, income classes, and ethnic and social groups, reinforcing the argument for more consistent and equitable measurement.