Abstract
There is urgent need to both reduce the rate of biodiversity loss caused by industrialized agriculture and feed morepeople. The aim of this paper is to highlight the role of places that harbor traditional ecological knowledge, artifacts, and methodswhen preserving biodiversity and ecosystem services in landscapes of food production. We use three examples in Europe ofbiocultural refugia, defined as the physical places that not only shelter farm biodiversity, but also carry knowledge and experiencesabout practical management of how to produce food while stewarding biodiversity and ecosystem services. Memory carriersinclude genotypes, landscape features, oral, and artistic traditions and self-organized systems of rules, and as such reflect adiverse portfolio of practices on how to deal with unpredictable change. We find that the rich biodiversity of many regionallydistinct cultural landscapes has been maintained through different smallholder practices developed in relation to localenvironmental fluctuations and carried within biocultural refugia for as long as millennia. Places that transmit traditionalecological knowledge and practices hold important lessons for policy makers since they may provide genetic and culturalreservoirs — refugia — for the wide array of species that have co-evolved with humans in Europe for more than 6000 thousandyrs. Biodiversity restoration projects in domesticated landscapes can employ the biophysical elements and cultural practicesembedded in biocultural refugia to create locally adapted small-scale mosaics of habitats that allow species to flourish and adaptto change. We conclude that such insights must be included in discussions of land-sparing vs. land-sharing when producingmore food while combating loss of biodiversity. We found the latter strategy rational in domesticated landscapes with a longhistory of agriculture
Highlights
As worthy as such efforts are, we present a case for extending them to the promotion of place-based knowledge and methods for cultivating plants and animals that have been developed by people living in a particular biome and cultural context
We find that the rich biodiversity of many regionally distinct cultural landscapes has been maintained through different smallholder practices developed in relation to local environmental fluctuations and carried within biocultural refugia for as long as millennia
Neither the goal of reducing agriculture’s pressure on biodiversity nor the goal of increasing food production for a growing population can be achieved in isolation (Godfray 2011)
Summary
As worthy as such efforts are, we present a case for extending them to the promotion of place-based knowledge and methods for cultivating plants and animals that have been developed by people living in a particular biome and cultural context. Biocultural refugia do not shelter a defined biota; they carry knowledge about the practical management of food production while maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services (cf Barthel et al 2013a). Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), often integrated into such place-based knowledge (Olsson and Folke 2001, McKenna et al 2008), is of importance to the sustainable stewardship of any cultural landscape: it contains the cumulative and evolving body of knowledge, practices, and beliefs held by communities about their relations with the ecosystems in which they are embedded (cf Gadgil et al 1993, cf Berkes et al 2000, cf GómezBaggethun 2012). The ubiquitous industrialization of agriculture is rapidly eroding such practices and the biodiversity associated with them, treating them as “obsolete.” Traditional practices, along with their stewardship of interlinked social-ecological systems, are discarded in a kind of ongoing generational amnesia (Leopold 1949, Kahn 2002, Emanuelsson 2010)
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