Ephemeral Landscape Research Articles

Genetic structure and gene flow in Myocastor coypus (Rodentia: Echimyidae) populations inhabiting a highly modified agroecosystem of the Pampas region

Abstract Assessing the genetic diversity and gene flow among populations in combination with ecological data provides valuable insight into the spatial use and genetic structure of wildlife. Anthropic impact generates landscape changes that threaten species by favouring their isolation in small patches and limiting their connectivity. However, in some cases, it can increase genetic exchange among wild populations. Here, we used a set of 16 microsatellites to study the genetic diversity, population genetic structure, and historical and current gene flow of coypu (Myocastor coypus) populations, a semi-aquatic rodent that inhabits watercourses of the highly anthropized agroecosystems of the Pampas region. Our results showed moderate to high levels of genetic diversity and revealed the existence of genetic structure among populations. Bayesian analysis showed different patterns of genetic structure among and within sampling sites. Also, the patterns of historical gene flow differed from that seen today. These results, together with previous studies, suggest that anthropic pressure, habitat fragmentation and ephemeral landscapes in a highly modified ecosystem could alter the dispersal patterns of coypus in their native range, which would otherwise be different in an environment with low anthropic impact. The results provide new information that could be used in effective conservation programmes.

SL METAVERSE: MEDIA ANTHROPOLOGY

The metaverse that Neal Stephenson conceptualized in Snow Crash is much the same as the one that has evolved in recent years to accommodate networked virtual platforms. In anthropology these spaces are known as meta-places: a remix of information. Proposals like Second Life (SL), Fortnite or The Sims are already a name in the history of virtual universes, while worlds like The Sandbox, Decentraland or Axie exemplify contemporary decentralized organizations through their blockchain technology. The following contribution of ethnographic graphic story, experiential captures of virtual non-places, wants to document processes of appearance and disappearance through the image. Meanings, symbolisms, self-referentialities, ephemeral landscapes, mimesis of realities, dystopias or info-communicational disfigurements are some of the realities that hide behind each virtual creation or virtual island. Capturing these experiences in the first person over these years means approaching the logic and synergies of these meta-places. Specifically, the visual material shown is linked to the virtual world of Second Life. This metaverse constitutes one of the platforms most explored by the author, and currently retains its interaction design devised in 2003. Possibly Second Life, and its virtual peripheries, have given life to the burbclaves (isolated sites) and their social niches that Stephenson described to us, but also to a way of understanding the world inside and outside the interface.

Effimero e temporaneo: forme e linguaggi dello spazio pubblico nell’era dell’informazione


 
 
 
 In contemporary cities, closure and individualism predominate at the expense of ‘mixing’ and inclusion. By structuring the territories around the principles of speed and globalization, the Net has generated ‘weak links’ of social interaction that are reflected in a public space devoid of identity, used quickly and in solitude, dominated by the fear of the difference and by indifference. In opposition to these dynamics, the importance of collaboration emerges, the central value of an open city in which technology and society become resources to reconcile global and local, individual and community. In this direction, at the scale of public space, the collaborative actions of urban events and the bottom-up practices work on the immaterial component of the project: co-design processes guide the interventions of citizens, collectives and associations in the rediscovery of identity values, cultural meanings and emotions associated with places. The public space becomes a place of interaction and meeting again, experiencing a new culture of living through ‘fixed-time architecture’ which, while meeting the needs of the moment, imagine change. Ephemeral and temporary re-signify ordinary landscapes through collective creativity and direct action on places and, if on the one hand they express the acceleration of our era, on the other they become forms and languages of a project that, in an ecological vision, fits with the rhythms of nature, where everything changes and evolves to contribute to life.
 
 
 

Theoretical Repositioning of Automated Remote Sensing Archaeology: Shifting from Features to Ephemeral Landscapes

Automated remote sensing has made substantial breakthroughs for archaeological investigation. Over the past 20 years, the reliability of these methods has vastly improved, and the total number of practitioners has been increasing. Nonetheless, much of the work conducted, to date, focuses almost exclusively on specific topographic features and monumental architecture, ignoring the potential of automation to readily assess more ephemeral components of the archaeological record. Likewise, the emphasis on specific feature types overlooks broader landscape patterns, thus delegating automated remote sensing analysis as a method in and of itself, mostly disconnected from larger archaeological and anthropological investigations. Here, I review recent attempts to rectify this shortcoming by using automated analysis methods to record and explain ephemeral archaeological material distributions. While such research is limited, I argue that the successes achieved in these recent studies offer a pathway forward for automated remote sensing to become more fully integrated with archaeological work beyond the detection of specific topographically distinct features.

Sociability interacts with temporal environmental variation to spatially structure metapopulations: A fish dispersal simulation in an ephemeral landscape

Metapopulation structure emerges from the dispersal of individuals among spatially distinct patches across a low-quality matrix. While dispersing agents are typically modeled as functionally identical with limited, linear and non-directional dispersal, field studies argue for the incorporation of intraspecific trait variation, such as behavioral, into the modeling of dispersal. Individual personality is of growing interest as a trait that affects dispersal metrics yet remains understudied at large, field-relevant spatial scales. Here, we used an individual-based model to investigate the influence of sociability, a personality-type known to be linked to density-dependent dispersal decisions, on a metapopulation at the individual, local and regional scales. As personality dependent dispersal is temporally dependent, we also examined how emergent properties of the metapopulation varied across two dispersal scenarios: long and short dispersal windows. Overall, our results support the growing evidence that individual personalities can significantly structure metapopulations in both space and time, through negative relationships between sociability and dispersal distance and positive relationships between sociability and patch density. However, we also demonstrate the effects of personality are limited by environmental factors. At the larger spatial scales of our model, patch density as a function of distance from source, and proportion of the landscape occupied were more strongly influenced by the dispersal window than by the personality. Using these results, we derive hypotheses to be examined in future empirical research. As the climate continues to shift, and dispersal models are updated to reflect ever changing conditions, these results suggest individual personality types and the personality type by environment interaction should be considered to accurately reflect dispersal and manage valuable metasystems.

Expansion, Exploitation and Extinction: Niche Construction in Ephemeral Landscapes

We aim to understand general consequences of niche construction on metapopulation dynamics in ephemeral landscapes. To this effect, a contact process-like stochastic spatial model is introduced where local populations colonize and go extinct on a dynamic landscape of habitable and destroyed patches. In contrast to previous models, where the extinction threshold is a consequence of available niche rendered by global rates of patch destruction/renewal, here we investigate how the metapopulation persists when they are the sole generators of their own niche. Niche construction is full-filled by localized populations through the transformation of destroyed patches in their neighborhood to viable habitat for future colonization. With this theoretical framework we are able to address the dual nature of niche construction by investigating the ephemerality of the landscape (destruction rate) and the continuum of population level strategies, where construction comes at a cost to colonization. Using mean field theory and Monte Carlo simulations of the model, we are able to quantify optimal population level strategies in a wide range of ephemeral landscapes. Interestingly, we observe qualitative differences at the extinction threshold between analytic and numeric results. Investigating this discrepancy further, we find that increasing niche construction neighborhood in the spatial model leads to two interrelated effects i) an increased rate in range expansion ii) a loss in resiliency and return of the discontinuous transition at the extinction threshold. Furthermore, in the discontinuous regime of the model, spatial clustering prior to a critical transition disappears. This is a significant finding as spatial clustering has been considered to be an early warning signal before ecosystems reach their ‘tipping point’. In addition to maintaining stability, we find local niche construction strategies have an advantage when in scramble competition with an exploiter strategy because of their ability to monopolize the constructed niche due to spatial adjacency. As the niche construction neighborhood expands this advantage disappears and the exploiter strategy out-competes the niche constructor. In some cases the exploiter pushes the niche constructor to extinction, thus a tragedy of the commons ensues leading to ‘ecological suicide’ and a collapse of the niche.

Fear the reaper: ungulate carcasses may generate an ephemeral landscape of fear for rodents.

Animal carcasses provide an ephemeral pulse of nutrients for scavengers that use them. Carcass sites can increase species interactions and/or ephemeral, localized landscapes of fear for prey within the vicinity. Few studies have applied the landscape of fear to carcasses. Here, we use a mass die-off of reindeer caused by lightning in Norway to test whether rodents avoided larger scavengers (e.g. corvids and fox). We used the presence and abundance of faeces as a proxy for carcass use over the course of 2 years and found that rodents showed the strongest avoidance towards changes in raven abundance (β = −0.469, s.e. = 0.231, p-value = 0.0429), but not fox, presumably due to greater predation risk imposed by large droves of raven. Moreover, the emergence of rodent occurrence within the carcass area corresponded well with the disappearance of raven during the second year of the study. We suggest that carcasses have the potential to shape the landscape of fear for prey, but that the overall effects of carcasses on individual fitness and populations of species ultimately depend on the carcass regime, e.g. carcass size, count, and areal extent, frequency and the scavenger guild. We discuss conservation implications and how carcass provisioning and landscapes of fear could be potentially used to manage populations and ecosystems, but that there is a gap in understanding that must first be bridged.

Mapping histories and archiving ephemeral landscapes: strategies and challenges for researching small film festivals

ABSTRACT Film festivals have had a strong impact on small cinemas, contributing to the dynamic trends of national fields of film production. Drawing on research experience of mapping Chilean film festivals for the first time, this article discusses the methods used to identify film festivals and to reconstruct their historical trajectories. The article explores the strategies used to assemble fragmented and dispersed historical data from written and oral sources, by using both archival and ethnographic approaches. Examining the Chilean case, which involves smaller, lesser known and under researched film festivals, aims to shed some light on the challenges involved in researching the ephemeral cultural landscapes created by film festivals in precarious contexts. The article argues that festivals’ positioning as ever-present events means that they tend to lose their memories and have complicated relationships with their own pasts. This also has an impact on the ways in which we can study and understand the festival phenomenon. Researchers need to consider multiple methods and research strategies, involving a range of epistemological and ethical issues, which can both enrich and complicate film festival research.

Ephemeral cultural landscape. The vernacular Mayan heritage in its relationship with the territory

espanolPara los mayas la subjetivacion de las cosas es esencial en su filosofia de habitar el territorio, en donde todos son sujetos; por lo tanto, su arquitectura vernacula tambien asume esta percepcion al cobrar vida la casa. Para llegar a este precepto, se desarrollo un proyecto de investigacion que busco entender los procesos de transmision de los saberes para amarrar (construir) su arquitectura vernacula, en un estudio que involucro metodologias tanto del area de la arquitectura como de la antropologia. Durante el levantamiento de datos arquitectonicos se percato de este proceso de vida de las casas de los mayas, las cuales, al ser de materiales perecederos en su mayoria, llegan a un tiempo de vida, pero a la par se estan amarrando nuevas casas que cobraran vida cuando sean habitadas por las nuevas familias. Lo anterior hace de la arquitectura vernacula de los mayas efimera. Estos saberes constructivos tambien se han utilizado para crear otra arqui-tectura mucho mas efimera: los tablados (coso taurino) para las corridas de toros; al estar estos tablados vinculados con la fiesta patronal, su existencia es de solo una semana, conformando un paisaje cultural efimero propio de las poblaciones mayas de la Peninsula de Yucatan. Esta cualidad de lo efimero hace de la arquitectura vernacula maya una caracteristica esencial, pero tambien son parte vital de su existir al ser los escenarios de aprendizaje de los saberes constructivos. portuguesPara os maias a subjetivacao das coisas e essencial em sua filosofia de habitar o territorio onde todos estao sujeitos; portanto, sua arquitetura vernacular tambem assume essa percepcao, dando vida a casa. Para atingir esse preceito, foi desenvolvido um projeto de pesquisa que buscava entender os processos de transmissao de conhecimento para amarrar (construir) sua arquitetura vernacular, em um estudo que envolveu metodologias tanto da area de arquitetura quanto da antropologia. Durante a pesquisa de dados arquitetonicos, percebeu-se esse processo de vida das casas maias que, sendo principalmente materiais pereciveis, atingem um tempo de uso mas, ao mesmo tempo, novas casas que ganharao vida ao serem habitadas por novas familias. O exposto acima torna a arquitetura vernacular dos maias efemera. Esses conhecimentos construtivos tambem foram usados para criar outra arquitetura muito mais efemera: tablados para touradas, ligados aos santos padroeiros, sua existencia e de apenas uma semana, formando uma paisagem cultural efemera, tipica das populacoes maias da peninsula de Yucatan. Essa qualidade do efemero torna a arquitetura vernacular maia uma caracteristica essencial, mas elas tambem sao uma parte vital de sua existencia, pois sao os cenarios de aprendizagem do conhecimento construtivo. EnglishFor the Mayans, the subjectivation of things is essential in their philosophy of inhabiting the territory, where they are all subjects; therefore, their vernacular architecture also assumes this perception on bringing the house to life. To arrive at this precept, a research project was developed that sought to understand the processes of transferring knowledge to tie (build) their vernacular architecture, in a study that involved methodologies of both the area of architecture and anthro-pology. While surveying architectural data, this process of life of the Mayan houses was noticed, which, on mainly being made from short-lasting materials, have a given lifespan but, at the same time, new houses are being tied, that will come alive when they are inhabited by new families. This makes the vernacular architecture of the Mayans ephemeral. The knowledge to tie-up has also been used to create another much more ephemeral architecture: The “tablados” (bullrings) for bullfights. On these “tablados” being linked to the patron saint, they only exist for one week, forming an ephemeral cultural landscape typical of the Mayan populations of the Yucatan Peninsula. This ephemeral quality is an essential characteristic of the Mayan vernacular architecture, but they are also a vital part of their existence on being the scenarios to learn about construction.

Seascapes of ‘Submarine Squatters’: Commercial Dugong Fisheries of North Queensland

Submarine squatting, dugong fishing on the Queensland (Australia) coast during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a poorly understood livelihood. This study provides a fine-grained interpretation to expand our knowledge of the operation of commercial dugong fisheries through the practices of two commercial dugong fishers, John Lionel Ching and Daniel Dewar, operating in the Newry Island Group. Archaeological surveys of the Newry Island Group and nearby Stewarts Peninsula have highlighted the ephemeral nature of the commercial dugong industry in the seascape today. Despite this ephemeral landscape, contextualising the archival and archaeological research within a seascape framework has enriched our understanding of the daily lives of the commercial dugong fishers. It is important to acknowledge that a seascape approach is rarely applied to non-Indigenous archaeological contexts in Australia. The seascape approach used here has been successful in encompassing Western systems of maritime knowledge.

Dwelling: On the design, implementation and analysis of ‘Story Houses’ as multi-modal research method

ABSTRACT This article explores how dwelling—a mindful unfolding of thinking and being within the cosmos as a whole—can offer a useful lens to look at the deeper layer of mental health service users’ lived experiences, specifically in regards to the feeling of ‘being at home’. To do so, this article reflects on how dwelling has shaped design of a multi-modal research method—Story Houses—that combines poem writing, working with materials and interviews in a workshop environment. Methodological implications of the method are considered in regards to dwelling in the moment, abstracting time and space, unfolding memories and thinking through metaphors. A study with 18 mental health and wellbeing service users, 10 of which were interviewed, looks into the constant unravelling of seeming opposites like alone/together and explores the fantastical metaphor ‘sea’. It does so by adapting thematic analysis to mirror a dwelling lens. As a method, Story Houses can help create, open up and invite us to dwell in the non-literal, evocative and ephemeral landscapes of human existence.

Landscape of time and immobility

ABSTRACTThis paper sheds a light on the ephemeral landscape of Palestine. Under a deliberate process of ‘erasing, peeling, cutting and pasting’, the physical and mental maps of Palestine today are rapidly changing with the Palestinians being pushed out of the scene. This colonial project has been best represented by Sari Hanafi as ‘spacio-cidal’ as it targets the landscape and consequently the narrative of those who shape it.Stemming from the need for an alternative discourse to narrate and redraw the map from a local lens, I use the village of Beit Iksa as an example to portray the spatial restructuring of the landscape. I show how ‘greening’ casts a shadow on the Israeli colonial strategies that lie beneath to alienate and ‘reinvent’ the rural scene. And yet, because for every strategy of control there is a tactic to resist, I show how through spatial interventions, I tried to rethink the rural and challenge its ideological transformation into a void; a leftover landscape shaped by time and immobility and yet is loaded with spatial potentials and open to change.

Identifying and Analyzing Agricultural Landscapes Using Metal-Detector Survey and Nail-Batch Analysis

Ephemeral agricultural outbuildings and landscape elements that were integral to the management and production of Virginia plantations, such as barns, sheds, pens, and fence lines, are often difficult to locate and analyze using traditional archaeological survey and excavation techniques. The archaeological signatures of these types of sites are usually characterized by a relatively light scatter of nails, which can be efficiently found and preliminarily interpreted using a combination of metal-detector survey and nail-batch analysis. Drawing upon the historic Montpelier plantation as a case study, this study shows how these survey-level data can help archaeologists begin to interpret how outbuildings were located, constructed, deconstructed, and used in the 18th and 19th centuries. Using these easily replicated methodologies, archaeological data relating to ephemeral rural landscapes from a variety of regions and time periods can be recovered and examined, allowing for more holistic understandings of spaces and places in the past.

Ephemeral landscape and urban shrinkage

The paper investigates the phenomenon of short-lived landscapes in European cities, analysing the causes and contexts of their emergence, exploring their links with urban shrinkage, and examining their roles in urban transformation. Five cases from Liverpool, Glasgow, London, Paris, and Brussels are studied in two groups of garden festivals and temporary parks, covering a range of scales, periods, locations, and agents of development. Economic, political, and cultural changes have created the conditions of urban shrinkage and temporary interventions, whereby landscape is treated as a flexible means to an end, a short-lived event that reflects, and paves the way for, structural change. As the cases demonstrate, however, the instrumental use of landscape for economic purposes is not the only way forward.

Festivals, Rituals, and Urban Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Maharashtra

Urban landscapes are formed and reformed through the interactions of people, place, and time. These processes are most of the time slow-paced (except in the event of disasters, wars, or deliberate interventions) and their effect is apparent over a span of decades, if not centuries. However, urban landscapes can transform in a matter of days, although temporarily, through various rituals and festivals celebrated at the level of a neighbourhood or a city. Such rituals and festivals played an important role in giving meaning to the urban landscape of eighteenth-century Maharashtra. The meaning-making operated at the level of regions, settlements, and neighbourhoods. In settlements, these rituals and festivals gave sanctity to the town, protected it from supernatural forces, and symbolically connected it to the cosmic whole. The paper discusses such meaning-making through the instrument of rituals and festivities as observed in eighteenth-century Maharashtra (in India) under the Peśvā rulers (a Persian word meaning ‘leader’).The first part of the paper examines urban festivals and rituals in pre-colonial India as studied by various scholars. In the second part, the emergent themes are studied in the context of Maharashtra, both as observed through historic contemporary literary sources and through field study in Wai (in Satara district, Maharashtra). The latter part focuses in particular on the festival of the river goddess Kṛṣṇā celebrated at Wai as an example of a living tradition of urban festivals. It is argued that the study of ephemeral urban landscapes reveals continued associations and meanings that a culture group attaches to them. This understanding is important for managing historic urban landscapes, not just for their physical fabric, but also for the values and continuities embedded in them.

Yörük Legacies: Space, Scent, and Sediment Geochemistry

This paper explores ephemeral landscapes of smell using datasets from ethnographic fieldwork, archaeological survey, and sediment geochemistry in western Anatolia. Our analysis brings together regional datasets from the late Ottoman period to the present to understand the places that mark the transition from the agropastoral migratory lifeways of Yoruk tribes to settled communities. We explore one Yoruk-legacy (Tekeli tribe) compound to understand ‘settled’ lifeways over three generations, and how study of these legacy traditions may be a valuable contribution to experimental archaeology. Our entry into this discussion is a study of food – its preparation, storage, and consumption – and its associated olfactory landscapes. While ethnography helps determine how aromas define active and contemporary spaces and spheres of intimacy, sediment geochemistry offers a method for investigating archaeologies of aroma.

Ephemeral Urban Landscapes of Guerrilla Gardeners: A Phenomenological Approach

This short research paper discusses the potential for understanding Guerrilla Gardening—a practice that creates informal and illegal green areas in urban environments—as a practice that both appropriates urban space and renders it public on the grounds of temporality, hybridity and humility. Guerrilla Gardening achieves this kind of publicness through the creation of an ephemeral landscape that both overlaps the existing programme of a space and makes rules and representations that it communicates visible and available for analysis. The paper offers a preliminary descriptive analysis of the practice and discusses the importance of linking the research on Guerrilla Gardening to the subjects of power and public space. This paper also proposes a phenomenological approach to understanding Guerrilla Gardening as a spatial practice through which individuals express their need for dwelling and caring by the means of recreating urban space.

Reply to comment by Hillis et al. (2013)

We agree that there is now convincing evidence which favours the idea that a region encompassing the British Isles is dynamically supported by convective circulation beneath the lithospheric plate. For example, the coincidence of a long wavelength (>800 km) free-air gravity anomaly with anomalously slow velocities beneath the lithospheric plate suggests that regional elevation of Northern Britain is maintained by a tongue of hot asthenosphere protruding away from Iceland (Jones et al. 2002a; Arrowsmith et al. 2005). These observations are corroborated by the crustal thickness measurements of Davis et al. (2012). The Icelandic plume initiated 62 Ma and there is excellent evidence in the Irminger and Icelandic basins that this plume has waxed and waned with different periodicities (Jones et al. 2002b; Poore et al. 2009). This transient activity has manifest itself in geochemical and earthquake records along the Reykjanes Ridge (Poore et al. 2011; Parnell-Turner et al. 2013), in the Neogene record of deep-water overflow across the Greenland-Scotland Ridge (Poore et al. 2006), and along the fringing continental margins where spectacular buried ephemeral landscapes have been encountered (Shaw-Champion et al. 2008; Rudge et al. 2008; Hartley et al. 2011). Around the British Isles, there is considerable onshore and offshore evidence favouring a history of transient and/or permanent vertical motions which may reflect Palaeogene and Neogene plume activity (White & Lovell 1997; Jones et al. 2001; Jones et al. 2002a; Al-Kindi et al. 2003; Jones & White 2003; Mackay et al. 2005). This regional pattern of epeirogeny is locally complicated by faulting and folding, which is often difficult to date with precision.

Last Glacial Maximum dune activity in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa: observations and simulations

It has long been understood that as ephemeral landscape features sand dunes are highly sensitive to environmental change, and thus their distribution and the timing of their development may provide clues to past climate dynamics. The relationship between climate and dune activity, however, is neither simple nor straightforward, with a range of controls affecting the balance between erodibility (the availability of sediment for deflation) and erosivity (the potential for sediment transport). To explore such complex systems over large spatial and temporal scales, a number of dune activity indices (DAI) have been created that incorporate wind speed and moisture balances to calculate the potential for, and degree of dune mobilisation. Using modern weather station data, these indices have generally been shown to provide reasonable indications of dune activity potential. Until recently, however, the detailed quantitative data required to inform these equations has not been available for past climate scenarios, and attempts to determine the relative importance of the various controls of dune activity have relied on rough estimations of climatic parameters. This paper combines data from monthly general circulation model (GCM) outputs from the coupled Ocean-Atmosphere GCMs for 21 ka with the most detailed DAI equation presently available to calculate the potential for dune reactivation in southern Africa during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 18–24 ka). Based on these data and calculations it is indicated that there was significantly less potential for dune activity across southern Africa at 21 ka. When compared to the aeolian sediment records from the region, this study poses serious and fundamental questions about: 1) the reliability of the model outputs, 2) the degree to which DAIs are able to account for the complexity and dynamics of aeolian systems, and/or 3) the interpretation of dune records as palaeoclimatic proxies at millennial time scales.

Stooking the Peanuts: Historical Agriculture and the Management of a Dying Seasonal Landscape, North-East New South Wales, Australia

Popular interest in seasonal landscapes reflects the importance of ephemera in people's appreciation of landscapes. Landscape management tends to focus on long-term and reasonably permanent qualities, typically at annual and, especially, decadal time scales. However, human interest in shorter-term and ephemeral landscape qualities—such as seasonal qualities—allows people to use scales of direct human experience to identify and define landscapes. Brassley (1998), reviewing the ‘unrecognized significance of the ephemeral landscape’, notes that permanent components are managed through planning instruments; while ephemera may be crucial to landscape appearance, they are largely unprotected or not managed. Here a seasonal landscape of historic peanut farming that remains, in small pockets, in northern New South Wales, Australia, is examined with a view to identifying sustainable management of this landscape. The landscape becomes visually distinctive during the annual cycle of cropping when peanuts are placed in rows of stooks. Stooks are small circular stacks of harvested plants built around a tomato stake and capped by a sack, used to dry the peanuts immediately after harvesting; they appear to be unique. Following Brassley's observations regarding the lack of management of ephemera in landscapes, the long-term viability and conservation of this landscape are examined. The problem is further heightened by the fact that, while this landscape is visually distinctive, it also represents a social and agricultural activity that is in decline and unlikely to survive in the near future. This raises questions about the long-term sustainability of such a seasonal landscape—it is truly ephemeral both annually and in the long term—and options for the retention of at least some of the key landscape components within a contemporary landscape are explored.