Sustaining ecosystem services in cultural landscapes

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Classical conservation approaches focus on the man-made degradation of ecosystems and tend to neglect the socialecological values that human land uses have imprinted on many environments. Throughout the world, ingenious land-use practices have generated unique cultural landscapes, but these are under pressure from agricultural intensification, land abandonment, and urbanization. In recent years, the cultural landscapes concept has been broadly adopted in science, policy, and management. The interest in both outstanding and vernacular landscapes finds expression in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, the European Landscape Convention, and the IUCN Protected Landscape Approach. These policies promote the protection, management, planning, and governance of cultural landscapes. The ecosystem services approach is a powerful framework to guide such efforts, but has rarely been applied in landscape research and management. With this paper, we introduce a special feature that aims to enhance the theoretical, empirical and practical knowledge of how to safeguard the resilience of ecosystem services in cultural landscapes. It concludes (1) that the usefulness of the ecosystem services approach to the analysis and management of cultural landscapes should be reviewed more critically; (2) that conventional ecosystem services assessment needs to be complemented by socio-cultural valuation; (3) that cultural landscapes are inherently changing, so that a dynamic view on ecosystem services and a focus on drivers of landscape change are needed; and (4) that managing landscapes for ecosystem services provision may benefit from a social-ecological resilience perspective.

Simulating and delineating future land change trajectories across Europe

“…Here, the indicator developed by Pérez-Soba et al (2010) was based on the Universal Soil Loss Equation (Wischmeyer and Smith 1978). Erosion risk is given in tons per hectare at a 1 km 2 resolution.…”

Ecosystem Services as a Boundary Concept: Arguments from Social Ecology

“…This basic idea can be challenged by at least two considerations: first, the very nature of ecosystems in most parts of the world, which are mostly culturally transformed landscapes, and which depend in their delivery of services very much on the modification through human activities [24,25]; and, second, the very nature of benefits, which in most cases need interventions in the form of labour and technology [22]. At first glance, the first argument does not seem to be decisive, as the same modification of ES delivery is also addressed by the feed-back loop of the Cascade Model.…”

“…For example, research on ES assumes, usually implicitly, that ES are provided by ecosystems as natural processes independent from human influences. This assumption, however, ignores the role of human interventions (labour, technology, and capital) in improving the supply of ES (in particular, agricultural goods, but also forest products and cultural or regulating services) by transforming 'natural ecosystems' into human-modified cultural landscapes [21][22][23][24][25]. While one study shows that humans indeed often contribute to the maintenance and enhancement of ecosystems [26], another emphasises "that increased use of manufactured and financial capital might deliver higher quantities of ecosystem services in the short-term but is often associated to several trade-offs in space and time" [27] (p. 271).…”

“A shepherd has to invent”: Poetic analysis of social-ecological change in the cultural landscape of the central Spanish Pyrenees

“…Cultural landscapes are recognized and protected by the UNESCO World Heritage Convention for their tangible and intangible natural and cultural values, including traditional knowledge, management systems, and institutions (Rössler 2006). However, many cultural landscapes, especially those created and maintained by traditional land-use systems, are under threat from a variety of sometimes contradictory demographic and development pressures ranging from land abandonment to intensification and urbanization of land use, which may affect a broad range of ecological services provided by these landscapes (Plieninger et al 2014a).…”