What are ‘Integrated Landscape Approaches’ and how effectively have they been implemented in the tropics: a systematic map protocol

Background There is an increasing acceptance that sectorial approaches to land management are no longer sufficient to meet global challenges such as poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation, and food production. The pressing challenge of integrated landscape management is to link agricultural practices, institutions and policies with other landscape-scale activities. “Integrated Landscape Approaches” provide a basic framework for balancing competing demands and integrating policies for multiple land uses within a given area. However, attempts to formalize and characterize what landscape approaches actually represent have resulted in a plethora of interlinked terminology and re-invention of ideas and practices under multiple guises. This has led to delayed uptake amongst policy makers and resistance to implementation on the ground. This protocol will describe the methodology to be employed for a systematic map that will chart the development of the landscape approach theory, consolidate and synthesize existing definitions, and identify where and how these approaches have been implemented in the humid and dry tropics. Methods/Design A scoping exercise gave rise to a selection of search terms appropriate to the research question which will then be applied to a suite of specialist, online and institutional databases. The protocol will follow a population-intervention-comparator-outcome (P.I.C.O) framework which provides the basic rationale for evidence-based systematic literature searches. The P.I.C.O serves as the inclusion criteria and together with a pre-determined exclusion criteria will be used to screen retrieved literature for relevance at title, abstract and full text levels. All studies investigating either landscape approach theory or implementation within the humid and dry tropics will be included. The resulting studies will be coded and used to satisfy two key outcomes. First, literature on the theory of landscape-scale approaches will be compared and contrasted to identify where overlap and disjuncture exists. Second, studies of landscape approach implementation will be assessed for effectiveness, geographically mapped, made available in searchable databases and supplemented with a full report.