Diversity in a Norwegian agrarian landscape: Integrating biodiversity, cultural and social perspectives into landscape management

Abstract

Environmental management and planning represent a relatively static and detached view of the agrarian landscape, contrasting with a dynamic perspective focusing on human participation, action, and perception of the landscape. This perspective focuses on species and nature types in the agrarian landscape as a result of dynamic processes. We present an interdisciplinary and historical case study of Kaus farm in Gudbrandsdalen, Norway, focusing on both external factors or drivers influencing landscape diversity – such as environmental, agricultural and cultural heritage policy – and the farmer's decisions and practices. The mapping of botanical and cultural heritage shows that, even over a 60-year period, the farm's biodiversity has changed in accordance with these forces. The study recommends that future landscape management should regard knowledge of the factors that have changed the diversity of an agrarian landscape as being of equal importance to knowledge of the existing diversity.