The field for application of biomass is rising. The demand for food and feeding stuff rises while at the same time energy, chemicals and other materials also need to be produced from biomass because of decreasing fossil resources. However, the biorefinery ideas and concepts can help to use the limited renewable raw materials more efficiently than today. With biorefineries, valuable products, such as platform chemicals, can be produced from agricultural feedstock, which can subsequently be further processed into a variety of substances by the chemical industry.

Cities are not socially homogenous, but divided into socially and structurally differentiated sub-units. Likewise, the individuals of a community, city or neighbourhood present specific behavioural patterns and uses with respect to their public green areas. This premise has led us to explore the question of how the perceptions, uses, and behaviours of people from different countries, cultures, and socioeconomic levels in Chile, Germany and Spain differ or coincide as far as urban nature and landscapes are concerned.

Landscapes differ in their capacities to provide ecosystem goods and services, which are the benefits humans obtain
from nature. Structures and functions of ecosystems needed to sustain the provision of ecosystem services are altered
by various human activities. In this paper, a concept for the assessment of multiple ecosystem services is proposed
as a basis for discussion and further development of a respective evaluation instrument. Using quantitative and

Demographic change suggests substantial effects on future societal demands on agricultural landscape use and thus on rural areas. Demographic change is thereby defined as both the decrease of the population and the shift in the age distribution („aging“) and in the spatial distribution („rural flight“ particularly of young people).

New broader, adaptable and accommodating sets of themes have been proposed to help to identify, understand and solve sustainability problems. However, how this knowledge will foster decisions that lead to more desirable outcomes and analyses necessary to transition to sustainability remains a critical theoretical and empirical question for basic and applied research. We argue that we are still underestimating the tendency to lock into certain patterns that come at the cost of the ability to adjust to new situations.

Peninsula effects - decreasing richness with increasing distance along peninsula lobes - have been identified for
many taxa on large peninsulas. Peninsula effects are caused by differences in colonization and extinction predicted
by island biogeography or by environmental gradients along the peninsula. We compared species-area regressions
for cove patches (i.e., mainland) to regressions for lobe patches (i.e., on peninsula tips) for wet meadow birds
along a highly interdigitated shoreline (northern Lake Huron, USA). We conducted analysis both with and without

Topography and relief variability play a key role in ecosystem functioning and structuring. However, the most commonly used concept to relate pattern to process in landscape ecology, the so-called patch-corridor-matrix model, perceives the landscape as a planimetric surface. As a consequence, landscape metrics, used as numerical descriptors of the spatial arrangement of landscape mosaics, generally do not allow for the examination of terrain characteristics and may even produce erroneous results, especially in mountainous areas.

The relationships between patterns and processes lie at the core of modern landscape ecology. These dependences
can be quantified by using indices related to the patch-corridor-matrix model. This model conceptualizes
landscapes as planar mosaics consisting of discrete patches. On the other hand, relief variability is a key factor for
many ecological processes, and therefore these processes can be better modeled by integrating information concerning
the third dimension of landscapes. This can be done by generating a triangle mesh which approximates

Climate impact scenarios for agriculture usually consider yield development, landscape water balance, nutrient dynamics or the endangerment of habitats separately. Scenario results are further limited by roughly discriminated land use types at low spatial resolution or they are restricted to single sites and isolated crops. Here, we exemplify a well data based comprehensive sensitivity analysis of a drought endangered agrarian region in Northeast Germany using a 2050 climate scenario.

This study investigates today’s plant species richness and composition in cultivated and recently abandoned
arable land of Kosovo. Relationships between these aspects of vegetation and both environmental features
and agricultural management measures are studied at the regional and plot scale. In 2006, 432 vegetation relevés
with a standard plot size of 25 m² were recorded in cultivated fields. In 2007, data collection focussed on 41 plots
in arable fields that had been abandoned the year before. With respect to the environment, data analysis accounts

Appendix. Detailed description of materials
and methods

Mountain timber lines are relevant in the context of land abandonment and climate change. For Switzerland,
GIS-compliant delimitations of the tree line and the forest line are still lacking. Recent high-resolution landcover
information offers new possibilities for GIS-based approaches. In a Swiss-wide study, an analysis based
on slope zones was combined with a moving-window analysis to assess tree and forest line altitude, using
topographic data. The tree and the forest lines were delimited at the upper altitude reached by a tree or closed