It is assumed that during early settlement history, settlement characteristics corresponded to local strategies of adaptation to the natural environment. While these impacts were small or negligible during the earliest settlement phases, ongoing cultural development led to increasingly substantial interventions in the natural landscape and decreasing levels of dependency on local environmental conditions. Meanwhile, each kind of human impact affected the landscape’s dynamic equilibrium, causing changes in material fluxes. Depending on its sensitivity, each landscape reacted differently to disturbances.

The session deals with the evaluation of the interrelations between landscape systems and human landuse strategies and with the analysis of landscape sensitivity and landscape resilience to human impact.