We welcome the insightful critiques and specific concerns raised by Erbaugh and Agrawal (2017) of our recent treatise on landscape approaches (Reed, Van Vianen, Deakin, Barlow, & Sunderland, 2016). Their contribution provides an opportunity to clarify and advance an important debate about both the nature and future of multifunctional land management.

Erbaugh and Agrawal (2017) rightly highlight some of the conceptual difficulties involved in defining the landscape approach, and our ‘definition’was more a suggestion for how a landscape approach (LA) could be, and often is, conceived rather than a concrete characterization of how it should be. We have, throughout our work, tried to avoid prescriptive approaches. Although we recognize that this may have been unclear in the excerpt highlighted by Erbaugh and Agrawal (2017), we believe that this more open interpretation was evident in the context of our article (s)(Reed, Van Vianen, Barlow, & Sunderland, 2017; Reed et al., 2016) where we acknowledge the complexity and ambiguity of standardized definitions. Some of the confusion stems from our use of the term “framework”, as this term’s precise definition varies across disciplines. Given its specific meaning within social-ecological research (Ostrom, 2009), we agree with the concerns raised by Erbaugh and Agrawal that it is not suitable for describing the landscape approach in itself. We also agree that testable frameworks for implementation should be built on what Erbaugh and Agrawal refer to as the LA “management ethic” and what we regularly refer to as a LA “process”(rather than a project or rigid management formula). In fact, it was for this reason that we aimed to “provide the basis for the development of improved landscape management frameworks”(Reed et al., 2016). Thus, by and large there is general agreement—discipline-specific use of terms aside. Erbaugh and Agrawal (2017) also question why the “ten principles” of Sayer et al.(2013) were not included in the search strategy for the systematic review our publications are based on. As Erbaugh and Agrawal are in no doubt aware, we undertook a thorough, and system-