Restoration Of Cultural Landscapes Research Articles

Opportunities and precautions in the implementation of GIS-based analysis tools to cultural landscape restoration

Opportunities and precautions in the implementation of GIS-based analysis tools to cultural landscape restoration

The importance of paleoecology in the conservation and restoration of cultural landscapes

The importance of paleoecology in the conservation and restoration of cultural landscapes

Sustainable Design, Cultural Landscapes and Heritage Parks; the Case of the Mondego River

AbstractOver the past few decades, in both the USA and Europe, many cultural landscapes (CLs) facing social and economic decline have been revitalized through processes embracing planning, design, touristic ideas, heritage resources, local administrations and communities, resulting in cultural or heritage parks (HPs). This paper forms part of the debate on CLs and highlights their rehabilitation via HPs. The research raises the question of the role HPs have played within the restoration of CLs while aiming to bring the discussion into the current sustainable planning and land design debate. As a case study, it takes the experience of the Mondego River Heritage Park (MRHP), located in the central region of Portugal. The MRHP builds upon the European Landscape Convention, HPs' accomplishments and academic studies. Conclusions suggest heritage to be an effective driving force for sustainable development and the HP as an operative concept in the planning, land design and management of the territory. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Novel ecosystems in the restoration of cultural landscapes of Tl’chés, West Chatham Island, British Columbia, Canada

The small archipelago of Tl’ches, in coastal British Columbia, has gone through drastic social-ecological change culminating in the decline of traditional management practices, invasion of exotic plant species and, in the early 1960s, land abandonment. This is a common trend in cultural landscapes around the world. Cultural landscapes have great social-ecological significance, including cultural safeguarding and renewal, as well as maintenance of biodiversity, ecosystem functions and services, making them objects of special attention in conservation and restoration efforts. This study investigates the relationship between the Lekwungen people and heavily altered ecosystems in the context of ecological restoration for the cultural landscapes of Tl’ches. In order to thoroughly explore the ecological, social and cultural aspects and processes involved in the restoration of Tl’ches, this study combined different environmental sciences methodologies, including historical and archival research, semi-structured interviews and participatory observation with Lekwungen participants, as well as ecological field assessments and an innovative mapping approach termed Terrestrial Cultural Ecosystem Mapping (TCEM). This study generated historical and spatial references for ecosystem and land use change in West Chatham Island, as well as cultural and ecological understandings to support restoration. Although important native species such as Camassia spp. are still thriving, present-day ecosystems on this island are heavily altered from the natural Garry oak ecosystem reference sites and are largely dominated by exotic invasive shrubs and graminoid species. This investigation indicates that the Lekwungen value both the historical ecological conditions of the island and particular types of the present-day novel or hybrid ecological states, such as the overgrown heritage orchard and nonnative berries found on the islands. Present-day ecosystems of Tl’ches are a result of a hybrid management system (traditional and conventional), coupled with land abandonment for many decades. Restoration of Tl’ches must involve both ecological and cultural components. Therefore, intervention strategies should consider the incorporation of novel and hybrid ecosystems (i.e. naturalized exotic species) into a restoration plan for ecological, cultural, historical, and subsistence values.

Epilogue: Toward a Transdisciplinary Science of Ecological and Cultural Landscape Restoration

Abstract To bridge the gaps between restoration as a science and as a practice, restoration ecology has to broaden its scope toward transdisciplinarity in close cooperation with landscape ecologists and other holistic environmentally oriented scientists, professionals, practitioners, and stakeholders. For restoration, the ongoing transdisciplinary scientific revolution has opened new insights to cope with the complex bio‐hydro‐ and human‐ecological network relations. The Total Human Ecosystem (THE), integrating humans with all other organisms and their total environment at the highest level of the global hierarchy, should become the unifying holistic paradigm for all synthetic “eco‐disciplines.” These should link ecological knowledge, wisdom, and ethics with their scientific and professional expertise from the natural and social sciences and the humanities. As the tangible matrix for all organisms, including humans, our industrial Total Human Landscape is the concrete spatial and functional system of the THE. It forms a closely interlaced network of solar energy–powered natural and seminatural biosphere landscapes and fossil energy–powered urban and agro‐industrial technosphere landscapes. The self‐organizing and self‐creative restoration capacities of biosphere landscapes are driven by mutually amplifying auto‐ and cross‐catalytic feedback loops, but the rapidly expanding technosphere landscapes are driven by destabilizing “run‐away” feedback loops. To prevent a global breakdown and to ensure the sustainable future for both humankind and nature, these positive feedbacks have to be counteracted by restraining, cultural feedbacks of environmental planning and management, conservation, and restoration. As the theme of this special issue alludes to, this template should become an integral part of an urgently needed sustainability revolution, to which the transdisciplinary landscape restoration could contribute its important share.

Ecological and Cultural Landscape Restoration and the Cultural Evolution towards a Post‐Industrial Symbiosis between Human Society and Nature

I discuss ecological and cultural restoration within the broader context of the critical transition period from the fossil fuel age to the post‐industrial global information age. In this cultural evolutionary process, the restoration of natural and cultural landscapes should play a vital role. For this purpose, it has to be guided by a holistic and transdisciplinary systems approach, aiming not only at the organismic but also at the functional and structural restoration of ecological and cultural diversity as total landscape ecodiversity. For the development of suitable restoration strategies, a clear distinction has to be made between different functional classes of natural and cultural solar‐powered biosphere and fossil‐powered technosphere landscapes, according to their inputs and throughputs of energy and materials, their organisms, their control by natural or human information, their internal self‐organization and their regenerative capacities. Not only technosphere landscapes but also intensive agro‐industrial landscapes have lost these capacities and are heavily subsidized by fossil energy and chemicals, to the detriment of the environment and human health. They therefore have to be rehabilitated by more sustainable but not less productive agricultural systems based on organic farming. But their natural regenerative capacities can be restored only by regenerative systems, with the help of cultural “neotechnic” information. The promise for an urgently required evolutionary symbiosis between human society and nature in a sustainable post‐industrial total human ecosystem lies in the functional integration of such innovative regenerative systems and all natural and cultural biosphere landscapes with healthier and more livable technosphere landscapes. To this goal, ecological and cultural landscape restoration can make an important contribution.

Ecological and Cultural Landscape Restoration and the Cultural Evolution towards a Post-Industrial Symbiosis between Human Society and Nature

Ecological and Cultural Landscape Restoration and the Cultural Evolution towards a Post-Industrial Symbiosis between Human Society and Nature

From Biodiversity to Ecodiversity: A Landscape‐Ecology Approach to Conservation and Restoration

AbstractAn environmental revolution is urgently needed that will lead to a post‐industrial symbiosis between man and nature. This can be realized only if the present unrestrained biological impoverishment and neotechnological landscape degradation are replaced by the creation of healthy and attractive landscapes. Restorationists can fulfill a vital role in this process. They must broaden their scales from biodiversity restoration in small, protected nature islands to the large‐scale restoration of natural and cultural landscapes. To achieve this they must restore not only the patterns of vegetation but also the processes that create these patterns, including human land uses. Their goal should be to restore the total biological, ecological, and cultural landscape diversity, or “ecodiversity,” and its intrinsic and instrumental values of highly valuable, endangered seminatural, agricultural and rural landscapes. For this purpose it is essential to maintain and restore the dynamic flow equilibrium between biodiversity, ecological, and cultural landscape heterogeneity, as influenced by human land uses, which occur at different spatial and temporal scales and intensities. Recent advances in landscape ecology should be utilized for broader assessment of ecodiversity, including proposed indices of ecodiversity, new techniques such as Intelligent Geographical Information Systems (IGIS), and Green Books for the holistic conservation and restoration of valuable endangered landscapes. Restoration ecology can make an important contribution to an urgently needed environmental revolution. This revolution should lead to a new symbiosis between man and nature by broadening the goal of vegetation restoration to ecological and cultural landscape restoration, and thereby to total landscape ecodiversity.