Among the main effects of human activities on the environment are land use and resulting land cover changes. Such changes impact the capacity of ecosystems to provide goods and services to the human society. This supply of multiple goods and services by nature should match the demands of the society, if self-sustaining human–environmental systems and a sustainable utilization of natural capital are to be achieved. To describe respective states and dynamics, appropriate indicators and data for their quantification, including quantitative and qualitative assessments, are needed.

Despite general agreement on antagonist relationships between ecosystems capacity to simultaneously sustain the availability of regulating services and agricultural production, it is not clear how these tradeoffs operate in response to complexity loss at the rural landscapes level. Here we present a novel evaluation framework of ecosystem services (ES) and pose different response models to landscape complexity.

Most of the current global land cover datasets and global scale land-use models use a classification of land cover based on the dominant land cover type within a distinct region or pixel. Such a classification disregards the diversity and intensity of human influence on land systems. In this paper we propose a novel way of classification and modeling land-use using a classification based on land-use systems (LUSs) that represent specific combinations of human-environment interactions. A cluster analysis was used to identify and map these LUSs.