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 »Landscape is about people. "Landscape", according to the European Landscape Convention “means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”.
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 »The HERCULES project would like to announce the launch of HERCULES Labs, our new online tool for the landscape community to browse and share ideas about good practices in landscape management. A key objective of the HERCULES project is to strengthen the collaborative network of the landscape community. One way to do this is through the collection and dissemination of good landscape practices. We have developed an online tool called HERCULES Labs where members of the landscape community, be they practitioners, policy makers or scientists, can view a diverse range of good practices and initiatives that we have already gathered in our work, as well as add their own ideas and perspectives.
Read more »Can Landscape Stewardship really include restoration? Even more the concept of novel systems and their management? The upcoming workshops on the implementation of the European Landscape Convention in October have the sub-title “the landscape knows no boundaries”. That is true, but it is as true in time as it is in space, and that’s where restoration, and management of novelty, become important….
Read more »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.
Read more »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.
Read more »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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