Land use is a cornerstone of human civilization, but also intrinsically linked to many global sustainability challenges-from climate change to food security to the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Understanding the underlying technological, institutional and economic drivers of land-use change, and how they play out in different environmental, socio-economic and cultural contexts, is therefore important for identifying effective policies to successfully address these challenges. In this regard, much can be learned from studying long-term land-use change. We examined the evolution of European land management over the past 200 years with the aim of identifying (1) key episodes of changes in land management, and (2) their underlying technological, institutional and economic drivers. To do so, we generated narratives elaborating on the drivers of land use-change at the country level for 28 countries in Europe. We qualitatively grouped drivers into land-management regimes, and compared changes in management regimes across Europe. Our results allowed discerning seven land-management regimes, and highlighted marked heterogeneity regarding the types of management regimes occurring in a particular country, the timing and prevalence of regimes, and the conditions that result in observed bifurcations. However, we also found strong similarities across countries in the timing of certain landmanagement regime shifts, often in relation to institutional reforms (e.g., changes in EU agrarian policies or the emergence and collapse of the Soviet land management paradigm) or to technological innovations (e.g., drainage pipes, tillage and harvesting machinery, motorization, and synthetic fertilizers). Land reforms frequently triggered changes in land management, and the location and timing of reforms had substantial impacts on land-use outcomes. Finally, forest protection policies and voluntary cooperatives were important drivers of land-management changes. Overall, our results demonstrate that land-system changes should not be conceived as unidirectional developments following predefined trajectories, but rather as path-dependent processes that may be affected by various drivers, including sudden events.
Slovenia is a country of exceptionally diverse landscapes at the intersection of four major European macroregions: the Alpine, Pannonian, Dinaric, and Mediterranean regions. Terraces, which are a characteristic Mediterranean landscape element, occur in all landscape types, but they vary in terms of density, purpose, and current function. Terraces, which define the most characteristic terraced landscape, are most common in the Mediterranean environment. However, they are also common in Karst-Dinaric landscapes and the wine-growing Pannonian hills, but are more unusual in mountainous Alpine regions, where they occur especially in transition areas to Mediterranean landscapes. Different types of terraces are defined by their purposes: agricultural, viticultural, and fruit-growing. The first type is found across Slovenia, whereas the second and third types are found in hills with favorable climates for cultivating grapes and fruit trees. Agricultural terraces are older; with the declining role of agriculture, increased social mobility, and an ageing and insufficient agricultural workforce, these terraces have lost their former role and their former fields are now almost entirely replaced by meadows. With the exception of the Mediterranean region and some of the Dinaric regions, wine-growing terraces and the less common fruit-growing terraces are the product of modern, mechanized farming, and a different understanding of the quality of vineyard production. This requires greater separation between rows to allow the use of farm machinery between grapevines set further apart.
The established geographical name Bay of Piran refers to the largest bay in the Gulf of Trieste at the extreme north end of the Adriatic Sea. After the collapse of Yugoslavia and the emergence of independent countries demarcated along the borders of the former Yugoslav republics, the previously undemarcated body of water between Slovenia and Croatia became the focus of a border dispute between the two countries. One of the basic principles of proper treatment of geographical names is not to change established and widely used names.
This article presents the current state of protection of terraced landscapes as an important type of cultural landscape, both globally and in Slovenia. The UNESCO World Heritage List, the Satoyama Initiative list, and the Slovenian Register of Immovable Cultural Heritage are analyzed. The findings show that terraces rarely appear as a factor justifying protection, even though certain progress has been made in recent years. At least globally, this has clearly been contributed to by the 2010 adoption of the Honghe Declaration. Slovenia shows both a lack of appropriate criteria for identifying terraced landscapes worth protecting and an insufficiently systematic treatment of heritage sites that are already being protected.
This article discusses the delicate relationships when demarcating the concepts of endonym and exonym. In addition to problems connected with the study of transnational names (i.e., names of geographical features extending across the territory of several countries), there are also problems in ethnically mixed areas. These are examined in greater detail in the case of place names in Slovenia and neighboring countries. On the one hand, this raises the question of the nature of endonyms on the territory of Slovenia in the languages of officially recognized minorities and their respective linguistic communities, and their relationship to exonyms in the languages of neighboring countries. On the other hand, it also raises the issue of Slovenian exonyms for place names in neighboring countries and their relationship to the nature of Slovenian endonyms on their territories. At a certain point, these dimensions intertwine, and it is there that the demarcation between the concepts of endonym and exonym is most difficult and problematic.
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