Cultural Landscapes Blog

A digital platform which seeks to highlight research, to engage practitioners from the field, to showcase best practices, and contribute to discussions.

We have 11 search results for this tag „landscapes”

How landscape and nature management offer multiple benefits in an intensive-farmland

23 February 2016/by Trisha Franke and Ben Delbaere/Tags: agricultural landscapes, ecosystem services, farmland consolidation

How landscape and nature management offer multiple benefits in an intensive-farmland

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.

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Multi-functional field margins in agriculture landscapes

30 September 2015/by Romano De Vivo/Tags: agriculture landscapes, field margins, biodiversity, EFAs

Multi-functional field margins in agriculture landscapes

Food production has increased many folds since the advent of sophisticated farm inputs, better farm management practices, and technologies delivering greater food security around the world - saving over a billion people from starvation. Agriculture has involved developing high-yielding crop varieties, expanding irrigation infrastructure, modernizing management techniques, distributing hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and crop protection to farmers. Since then, agriculture has seen big changes in production methods, including increased mechanization and farm consolidation. These developments have been accompanied by reductions or even the removal of margins, hedges, ponds, and other uncultivated areas rich in biodiversity.

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Art and responsible landscape development: A plea for landscape art

22 September 2015/by Lars Fischer/Tags: landscape development, landscapes art,

Art and responsible landscape development: A plea for landscape art

Landscapes are spaces that have been appropriated, imprinted, and divided through the efforts of humans. Whether farmer, forester, fisher, conservationist, local politician, tourism manager or simply a resident, such people put value on and use the natural and culturally created potential of landscapes in very different ways that seem to inevitably lead to conflict. Thus, it would appear that a responsible approach to landscape development can only be successfully brought into existence through a process of collective debate, discussion and even argument between various kinds of people. Landscape art offers myriad possibilities for providing potent impulses that can enable people with their own specific ideas, experiences, and knowledge to take part in the debates and discourse on how to shape the landscapes they are involved in.

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The Eh da-Initiative: A Project to Support Bees in Agricultural Landscapes

7 July 2015/by Christoph Künast/Tags: biodiversity, habitat management, agricultural landscapes,

The Eh da-Initiative: A Project to Support Bees in Agricultural Landscapes

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.

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How do Europeans appreciate agrarian landscapes? Generic and spatial patterns of landscape preferences

18 February 2015/by Boris van Zanten/Tags: agrarian landscapes, cross-disciplinary, landscape policies

How do Europeans appreciate agrarian landscapes? Generic and spatial patterns of landscape preferences

Europe is known for its abundant and diverse cultural landscapes. In many places, the cultural or aesthetic value of these landscapes is threatened by either intensification or abandonment of agricultural practices. The effects of these processes have been addressed by local landscape preference case studies which have yielded a patchy and heterogeneous collection of evidence. This meta-study compares case studies in order to find generic and spatial patterns of landscape preferences.

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What causes rural land use change in Europe?

24 November 2014/by Jasper van Vliet/Tags: Cultural landscapes, driving forces, landscape management

What causes rural land use change in Europe?

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.

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Gardening the Cultural Landscapes of European Heritage

7 November 2014/by David Harvey/Tags: Cultural heritage, landscapes, heritage categorisation

Gardening the Cultural Landscapes of European Heritage

I was recently invited to present a seminar paper in Amsterdam, at the annual HERCULES Consortium Meeting. Bringing together geographers, ecologists, archaeologists, sociologists and anthropologists from a dozen or more countries, this project is concerned with ensuring the resilience of heritage within the cultural landscape of Europe. They are doing this task by assessing existing knowledge and management systems and developing tools for ongoing landscape observation and modelling, bringing together some sophisticated GIS applications with a variety of quantitative material (including remote sensing, land-use and census data), and qualitative material (including old postcards and oral histories). Furthermore, they also have an ambition to define some recommendations for landscape policy and practice, engaging with a range of stakeholders, policy makers and ordinary people.

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European wood-pastures as cultural landscapes

11 September 2014/by Tobias Plieninger/Tags: wood-pastures, cultural landscapes

European wood-pastures as cultural landscapes

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.

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“Field boundaries are the most important letters of our landscape”

11 August 2014/by E. J. Mooiweer/Tags: Cultural Landscapes, CAP, greening, landscape features, field boundarie

“Field boundaries are the most important letters of our landscape”

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.

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Sustaining cultural landscape values. The need for a mature ecosystem services approach

7 July 2014/by Tobias Plieninger/Tags: cultural landscapes; driving forces; ecosystem services; landscape management; socio-cultural valuation

Sustaining cultural landscape values. The need for a mature ecosystem services approach

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.

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THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN CULTURAL LANDSCAPES

3 June 2014/by David King/Tags: human element, cultural landscapes, research project, local benefits

THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN CULTURAL LANDSCAPES

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.

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