Cultural Landscapes Blog

The value of agricultural areas goes far beyond food services. When management is set to enhance various natural elements like valuable roadside vegetation, buffer strips nearby streams, orchards and hedgerows in agricultural landscapes, these areas can provide a multitude of other services to society.

Biodiversity protection needs space, and this resource is sparse in most agricultural landscapes. The Eh da-initiative which started in Germany raises the question if more space than generally considered for bees (wild bees as well as honeybees) in agricultural landscapes is available, how this space - if it should be available - can be used, and how an initiative in order to promote bees can be implemented.

A large share of the European land is agricultural and this agricultural land has changes considerably over the last few decades. Such land use changes are the result of local conditions, such as local policy measures, cultural values, accessibility, and the local climate. Many case studies have been published that describe local land use changes. This study collected available case study evidence to find general patterns in agricultural land use change in Europa and the processes causing these changes.

Cultural landscapes, the object at the heart of the HERCULES project, are shaped by long-lasting, intensive and complex interactions between people and nature. This interaction has generated values that are appreciated by society, nowadays called “landscape values“ or “ecosystem services“, but many of these cultural landscape values are in decline.

Last year the Dutch Association for Cultural Landscapes published ‘Beautiful Europe’, a book concerning changing cultural landscapes, climate change and nature in isolation. It was presented and distributed to many representatives of the European Commission and Parliament. In this context, this article discusses the baseline of greening the CAP and the protection of landscape features on farmland in Europe.

Until recently much of the research on global land-use change was focused on ‘wild’ lands and the shifting agricultural frontier, reporting trends such as deforestation, desertification, disappearance of wetlands, or burning of peatland. In the HERCULES project we acknowledge that we live in a ‘post-wild’ world today. Therefore, we need to pay equal – or if not more – attention to sustaining the values of the many landscapes of the world that have been shaped by human agency over centuries. In a recent special feature of the Ecology & Society journal, we draw attention to the fate of cultural landscapes, seeking to engage with generic processes of change by adopting and adapting an ecosystem services approach that is sensitive to local context.

I would imagine that the concept of ‘cultural landscapes’ is not immediately obvious to the average person. So why would the European Commission want to support a collaborative research project to protect and manage cultural landscapes, called the HERCULES project? Some clarity was provided at the first Stakeholder Workshop on the project, organised by the European Landowners Organization in Brussels late last month.