This blog last year featured the publication of the first volume of the “Satoyama Initiative Thematic Review” (SITR), containing insights from analysis of landscape-management case studies related to “enhancing knowledge for better management of socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes”, and the publishers are pleased to share with readers that the second volume has been published and is now available for download.
Read more »The Knowledge Hub is an old friend of the HERCULES project. The platform that first saw light already in month 9 of the project, had grown within the lifetime of the project into a formidable tool for collecting, visualizing, modelling, sharing and distributing HERCULES’ project results to everyone. Thus created layers of information have the potential to provide nothing less than an evolving ‘Atlas of Landscapes’ for Europe.
Read more »When the idea of submitting a proposal for a project that would deal with “cultural landscapes” came up in 2012, there was a lot of ambiguity to what cultural landscapes are and what the proposal should be about. Yes, there were the specifications of the call, but even in these cultural landscapes were mostly linked with “heritage” as well as with society and its values and the environment. The HERCULES team had a slightly different understanding of the concept, linking cultural landscapes with an evolving and changing perception of space and its management (fortunately the reviewers accepted this more dynamic view). This ambiguity guided also the allocation of tasks within the project, as we realized that we needed to carefully scan what was the “state of the art” in cultural landscape science. At the heart of our interest were the questions of how, why and how fast cultural landscapes changed. In addition, we were interested in reviewing more practical and “hands on” initiatives related with cultural landscapes management and conservation. This was the task of Work Package 1 (I will leave the conception that this kind of work can be meaningfully divided into “packages” for a future discussion…).
Read more »We are all familiar with the idea of “case studies” as one of the means used in many kinds of projects and publications for demonstrating conditions and practices in landscape management. Case studies can show what does and does not work, provide lessons that may or may not be replicable in different landscapes, or just contain basic information that adds to the overall knowledge base. Just collecting this kind of information can itself be a difficult and time-consuming endeavor. But how many of us actually take the time to comb through others’ collections of case studies? Without careful thought to how relevant information can be effectively extracted and used, there is a risk that case study collection will result in a glut of data from which it is impossible to gain useful knowledge. With this in mind, the first volume of the “Satoyama Initiative Thematic Review” (SITR) was recently published, containing insights from analysis of landscape-management case studies that should be useful to many Cultural Landscapes Blog readers.
Read more »Throughout Europe, numerous examples exist of traditional dishes that depend on local wild plants, mushrooms, or game meat. Traditional cuisines are commonly developed based on the locally available products, and in many European regions this comprised a wealth of food collected from the wild. Picking berries, plants, or mushrooms, hunting, and angling, are important activities and possibilities for doing so are strongly related to landscape management. Should wild food collecting be considered in landscape stewardship, and which possibilities exist for that?
Read more »The Knowledge Hub is an interactive online mapping tool, which enables any and all to record information; audio, text, photographs, film etc., and fix it to a specific location or area. This creation of multiple layers of information has the potential to provide nothing less than an evolving ‘Atlas of Landscapes’ for Europe.
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