Repercussion of anthropogenic landscape changes on pedodiversity and preservation of the pedological heritage

Over a period of time people have lived in and with their surroundinglandscapes and for several thousand years transformed the soilscapesand the vegetation into cultural landscape types important for theireconomy and to meet their needs (Richter 2007, Ellis 2011, Hjelle 2012).The sustainable provision of goods and services depends criticallyon managing soils without damaging the natural soilscapes and therelated natural resources. To support the transition towards sustainabledevelopment, science needs to understand how land-use change affectsthe environment and how this, in turn, feeds back into human livelihoodstrategies or infl uences the vulnerability of the environment (Rounsevell etal. 2012a). Interactions between decision-making, governance structures,production and consumption, technology, ecosystem services and globalenvironmental change infl uence human activities at the local and regionalscale, and are infl uenced by and feed back to the global scale, therebyshaping trajectories of human–environment interaction in land systems(Lambin and Meyfroidt 2011).