Natural and cultural heritage in mountain landscapes: towards an integrated valuation

Abstract

Mountain areas of Europe have been managed by humans for a long time, leading to a prevalence of semi-natural habitats in mountain landscapes today. These landscapes contain both natural and cultural heritage; however, natural and cultural heritage are rarely considered together when valuing landscapes and developing management plans in protected areas. Here we present a case study of seven protected areas in the mountains of Great Britain and Norway. We take a long-term perspective on landscape and land-use change and propose an integrated model of landscape valuation on the basis of combined natural and cultural heritage. Our model plots indicators of natural and cultural heritage along a gradient of land-use intensity, allowing simultaneous assessment and highlighting how valuation depends on what type of heritage is considered. We show that while contemporary land-use changes follow similar trajectories in Norway and Britain, different land-use histories mean that the loss of heritage differs between the regions. The model presented here thus allows for the consolidation of valuation based on both cultural and natural heritage in landscapes.

Ecology and long-term land-use, palaeoecology and archaeology – the usefulness of interdisciplinary studies for knowledge-based conservation and management of cultural landscapes

“…Management of natural and cultural heritage, respectively, is undertaken by different governmental institutions and is usually seen as two separate areas of conservation and research, and rarely discussed in joint approaches (Lowenthal 2005;Skår et al 2008, but see Speed et al 2012). In protection and conservation of natural heritage, biodiversity preservation is a crucial objective as expressed 322 K.L.…”

The relative contribution of grazing and climate variation on vegetation change in alpine area

“…Burga et al (2001) and Walther et al (2005). In these circumstances, herbivory and climate change oppose each other as herbivory usually constrains the advance of these functional types and to some extent actually causes a downward shift of trees and shrubs to a lower altitude (Speed et al, 2012). In long-term warming experiments in arctic and alpine areas, bryophyte abundance declined at moist sites (Hollister et al 2005;Elmendorf et al, 2012).…”

“…In ecosystems where grazing is the prevailing land use factor, it is difficult to study the effects of climate change on biota, without considering the effects of grazing (Speed et al, 2012;Olofsson et al, 2009). We know very little about how grazing and warming interact (Fuhlendorf et al, 2001;Olofsson et al, 2009) and the relative effect of these two factors on the vegetation is difficult to assess, because both occur in numerous spatial and temporal scales and are affecting the vegetation differently.…”

“…But as the effects of climate change have become more evident in the last two decades, many of the recent studies are dealing with both grazing and climate warming. (Fuhlendorf et al, 2001;Klein, 2005;Olofsson et al, 2009;Speed et al, 2012).…”

‘Conservation rural space’ – The case of agricultural cooperative settlements and open space in israel

“…Moreover, natural and cultural heritage are rarely considered together, even when both are closely linked within certain landscapes and could be conceptualized as inseparable. These are also managed separately, often based upon separate legislations and institutional structures (Speed et al [21]). In addition, even in cases where planning addresses both natural and cultural heritage in a given area, heritage assets are treated as individual items within the open landscape (Agnoletti [22]), thus disregarding the potential synergistically increased value of the heritage landscape fabric.…”