The Common Lands of Wales

Pastoral Stone Enclosures as Biological Cultural Heritage: Galician and Cornish Examples of Community Conservation

“…The same percentage applies to Cornwall that currently holds approximately 100 km 2 of common lands divided across almost 300 units. Most Cornish commons, however, are of relatively small size (40% are under 1 ha) with only 10 Commons larger than 200 ha [67]. As early as 1956, the Natural Conservancy stressed in a report to the Royal Commission on Common Land that commons were "wildlife sanctuaries", "reservoirs for species", "islands of semi-natural vegetation", and "disproportionately rich in examples of plant and animal communities which have largely been eliminated from surrounding localities" [68].…”

“…In spite of growing evidence of how indigenous peoples and local communities, through their knowledge and traditional management practices, play an active and effective role in ecosystem restoration, carbon sequestration, and prevention of environmental degradation [67], such groups continue to be considered mostly as passive recipients of restoration work while their cultural practices remain ignored in spite of being crucial to the preservation of biocultural heritage [69,70]. The findings presented in this article stress the leadership and engagement potential of local communities in bringing about effective conservation initiatives that bridge nature conservation, landscape planning and management, and heritage preservation on the basis of long-term biological and cultural relationships between people and their surroundings.…”

Commonage land and farmer uptake of the rural environment protection scheme in Ireland

“…However, studies which analyse the linkages between agri-environmental policy and commons are rare (Wilson, 1997;Short, 2000) and no research has been carried out on the uptake of agri-environment schemes by farmers involved in the management of commons. A number of studies have examined the contemporary role of commons from a collective rights (Brown, 2006a(Brown, , 2007, legal (Aitchison and Gadsden, 1992;Lafferty et al, 1999;Rodgers, 1999;Short and Winter, 1999;Humphries, 2000;Lyall, 2000), management (Aitchison and Hughes, 1988;Wilson, 1993;Brouwer, 1995;Edwards and Steins, 1998;Brown, 2006b;Kissling-Naf et al, 2002;McKenna et al, 2007) and rural development (Brown and Slee, 2004) perspective. Wilson (1997) and Short (2000) suggest how agri-environment schemes could be developed to enhance the valuable multifunctional role of commons, although these studies are not concerned with the determinants of agri-environment scheme adoption.…”