Hybrid Landscapes Research Articles

Symbiont plasticity as a driver of plant success.

We discuss which plant species are likely to become winners, that is achieve the highest global abundance, in changing landscapes, and whether plant-associated microbes play a determining role. Reduction and fragmentation of natural habitats in historic landscapes have led to the emergence of patchy, hybrid landscapes, and novel landscapes where anthropogenic ecosystems prevail. In patchy landscapes, species with broad niches are favoured. Plasticity in the degree of association with symbiotic microbes may contribute to broader plant niches and optimization of symbiosis costs and benefits, by downregulating symbiosis when it is unnecessary and upregulating it when it is beneficial. Plasticity can also be expressed as the switch from one type of mutualism to another, for example from nutritive to defensive mutualism with increasing soil fertility and the associated increase in parasite load. Upon dispersal, wide mutualistic partner receptivity is another facet of symbiont plasticity that becomes beneficial, because plants are not limited by the availability of specialist partners when arriving at new locations. Thus, under conditions of global change, symbiont plasticity allows plants to optimize the activity of mutualistic relationships, potentially allowing them to become winners by maximizing geographic occupancy and local abundance.

Exotic, traditional and hybrid landscapes: The subtle history of the Iberian Peninsula maize between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’

Societal Impact StatementMaize is the world's second most important agricultural crop. The cereal was unknown to Europeans before the end of the 15th century, but since its arrival in Europe, it has changed agriculture, food and landscapes. Terraces where maize was cultivated in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula contributed to the formation of local cultures and identities. The history of maize and maize landscape are mementos that help to recover traditional practices, fostering identities, and are crucial for the successful implementation of sustainable policies to provide prosperous futures.Summary Maize (Zea mays L.) in the Iberian Peninsula embodies a history of landscape changes where the concepts of ‘exotic’, ‘traditional’ and ‘hybrid’ help to understand the engagements between landscape, farmers, agronomists (since the 19th and 20th centuries) and seeds. Today, landscapes reveal biophysical and ecological changes that reflect a panoply of intentions. A multitude of agents, and their interactions, acted upon those territories over time. Using historical sources from the leading institutions dedicated to agricultural research in the Iberian Peninsula, this paper aims to (1) contribute to a better understanding of the maize landscape and culture in the Iberian Peninsula and (2) interrogate how landscape changes (and the landscape history of maize) can frame local or regional heritage and identities reflecting customs or ways of life. The analysis unveils networks of knowledge, agricultural technologies and seed exchange. Politicians, economists, engineers, agronomists, farmers, governmental officials and agricultural industries planned and transformed traditional rural practices into modern and industrialised ones. Experts and politicians, willing to improve agricultural practices and seeds, using hybrid seeds or building new irrigation systems, led to deep social and landscape changes, allowing maize to cover territories far away from its traditional domains. Moreover, despite farmers' resistance, hybrid maize substituted landraces, eroding agrobiodiversity. Nowadays, the south and east regions of the Iberian Peninsula are the main producers of maize (hybrid), whereas in the Northwest maize is an occasional crop, being replaced by vineyards for economic reasons.

Grappling with Weeds: Invasive Species and Hybrid Landscapes in Cape York Peninsula, Far Northeast Australia

The control of various introduced species brings to the fore questions around how species are categorised as ‘native’ or ‘invasive’, belonging or not belonging. In far north Queensland, Australia, the Cape York region is a complex mixture of land tenures, including pastoral leases, National Parks and Aboriginal land, and overlapping management agreements. Weed control comprises much of the work that land managers in Cape York do. However, different land managers target different introduced species for control, and the ways in which certain species are understood as more or less problematic indicate how land managers understand and seek to order landscapes. Through investigating the various positions that introduced species occupy, I will explore how Cape York emerges as a ‘hybrid landscape’ that is produced in contested, overlapping and ambiguous ways, and is rife with ‘feral dynamics’.

Paisagem-inovação-política: práticas contra-hegemônicas no Acampamento Cícero Guedes (MST)

Abstract Since colonization in Brazil, populations resistant to its agrarian model have fought for the right to land, alternative agricultural production, and usufruct of the landscape. Such prerogatives indicate the possibility of hybrid landscapes in the rural sphere and show horizons that favor healthy production, non-exploitation of rural workers, and policies that contribute to resolving inequalities in the countryside. The struggle of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) is discussed in this article, focusing on the landscapes they inhabit and on their ways of taking possession of such landscapes. Our reflection is based on the analysis of the Cícero Guedes (MST) camp, grounded on the Performance Assessment of the Built Environment, with readings from the innovation matrix in relation to the territory to see how it can affect the movement’s landscapes.

The cooling effects of hybrid landscapes at the district scale in mega-cities: A case study of Shanghai

Green spaces and water bodies can mitigate urban heat islands, and their cooling effects are influenced by certain characteristics and the surrounding environments. Under the influence of diverse built environments, what kinds of hybrid landscapes have a cooling effect, and which are ineffective? It is an essential issue to mitigate heat islands on the district scale, especially in mega-cities, and there remain fewer quantitative studies targeting it. This study developed a technical framework to analyze the cooling intensity and efficiency of hybrid landscapes in different built environments and took a typical mega-city, Shanghai, as an example. The samples were classified into five groups by characteristics of the built environment based on the proportions of buildings and their shadows. Furthermore, the efficient cooling intervals and the cooling intensities of hybrid landscape elements were identified based on their marginal effects. The findings showed that of all the elements, urban forests have a cooling capacity across various built environments, while water bodies and grasslands do not. In general, hybrid landscapes' cooling effects are weaker in districts with higher building density. This technical framework provides a way to mitigate heat islands in districts by planning hybrid landscapes, which can be generalized and be of practical value.

Deep Culture

Deep Culture

Cooling intensity of hybrid landscapes in a metropolitan area: Relative contribution and marginal effect

• Cooling intensity variance in hybrid landscapes was explored at the regional scale. • 5 indicators were chosen to cluster 8 hybrid landscapes using the K-medoids method. • FCD and PSSA are the indicators with a high impact on regional thermal environment. • Holding the forest canopy density around 0.4 is the optimal solution for cooling. • The economically optimal size of the shade is around 60% of the unit area. Rapid urbanization has exacerbated the urban heat islands (UHIs) effect. In the wind and thermal environment of integrated city-regions, UHIs and green infrastructure (GI) interact with each other. Cooling islands, formed mainly by GI with various landscape elements, can effectively reduce land surface temperature (LST) and promote local air circulation. The landscape elements hybridize and are jointly influenced by climate, distribution, and topography. However, little is known about the pattern of hybrid landscapes that have a sufficient cooling intensity to effectively mitigate the UHI effect. As such, this study selected the Taiyuan metropolitan area and constructed a research framework that clusters hybrid landscapes and quantifies the range of indicators of the optimal cooling intensity. The results were as follows: (1) Maintaining the forest canopy density above 0.4 is an effective measure to regulate the regional thermal environment; (2) In regions with complex topography, the shaded areas of vegetation and shaded slopes (over 60%) provide a stronger effect in reducing LST; and (3) The effect of landscape heterogeneity on LST needs to be considered. Finding more effective cooling methods in hybrid landscapes is still a question that needs to be explored in future research.

Shedding Light on Peri-Urban Ecosystem Services Using Automated Content Analysis

The objective of this paper is to provide an overall perspective on peri-urban ecosystem services in European Countries. The phenomenon of urbanization affecting our era has seen the shift of the city from compact and well-defined structures to agglomerations with a seamless expansion. This has led to several environmental consequences that have affected the urbanized areas and the surroundings. The peri-urban areas may be the main urban design and planning challenge of the 21st century. These hybrid landscapes, characterized by high fragmentation, can be turned into opportunities to improve the sustainability and quality of urban areas, generating multiple economic, social and environmental benefits. Areas beyond the immediate urban core can be considered a zone of influence, which represent a critical resource in terms of provisioning, regulating, supporting services and cultural ecosystem services. Our study has been developed in the framework of the project “Fertile Lands, Fragile Lands” funded by the University of Catania. A multi-phased method has been applied, showing strong, heterogeneous ties between landscape and ecosystem services. While the importance of literature studies on this topic is well recognized, the same attention has not been placed on the tools and methods of conducting systematic and incremental literature reviews. Using Leximancer software, we propose a text mining approach to extract relevant themes and concepts as well as related topics of interest from identified literature on peri-urban ecosystems. We first introduce the overall methodology and then discuss each phase in detail. The outputs can be used as starting point for broad exploratory reviews and allow further exploration in this issue. The results show how the peri-urban space can be seen as a mosaic in which the settlement, the agricultural and the environmental systems interact and coexist, placing at the centre the relationship of reciprocity between the built environment and the open territory.

La Regeneración de los bosques. Paisaje, prácticas y ontologías en el sur de Chile

Dwelling practices that contribute to regenerate the remnants of the template forest among local communities in southern Chile depend upon a relational ontology that is nourished by the Mapuche experience in the Andean foothills. The ethnography of everyday life in the borders of the twentieth-century timber expansion reveals that such practices orchestrate individuals of different species’ actions making daily subsistence possible. However, is not a mercantile definition of nature what inspires such practices but an understanding of the relationships among species as families or associations, where trees play a significant role, as exemplified by cases obtained in the field. The local communities' residential pattern embodies the intimate links among human and other beings conceived as partners in the process of being. However, this relational ontology takes place in hybrid landscapes and is strongly influenced by the historical circumstances faced by communities that have been dispossessed by the expansion of the logging industry. This article suggests the need to integrate the historic and the vital versions of materialisms for a better understanding of the ontological processes as experienced in the capitalist peripheries. Meanwhile, the recognition of these communities' contribution to the regeneration of native species remains unacknowledged.

Hybrid contractual landscapes of governance: Generation of fragmented regimes of public accountability through urban regeneration

In this article we explore the idea of public accountability in the contemporary entrepreneurial governance of cities, which are influenced by market dependency and private sector involvement. We specifically focus on the fragmentation of public accountability through hybrid contractual landscapes of governance, in which the public and private sector actors interactively produce a diversity of instruments to ensure performance in service. This is in sharp contrast to the traditional vague norms and values appealed to by urban planning institutions, to safeguard the public interest. We argue that within these complex contractual governance environments public accountability is produced by public and private sector actors, through highly diverse sets of contractual relations and diverse control instruments that define responsibilities of diverse actors who are involved in a project within a market-dependent planning and policy making environment, which contains context-specific characteristics set by the specific rules of public-private collaboration. These complexities mean public accountability has become fragmented and largely reduced to performance control. Moreover, our understanding of contractual urban governance remains vague and unclear due to very limited empirical studies focusing on the actual technologies of contractual urban development. By deciphering the complex hybrid landscapes of contractual governance, with comparative empirical evidence from The Netherlands, UK and Brazil, we demonstrate how public accountability is assuming a more ‘contractual’ and unpredictable meaning in policy and plan implementation process.

Identification of Marginal Landscapes as Support for Sustainable Development: GIS-Based Analysis and Landscape Metrics Assessment in Southern Italy Areas

Landscape is increasingly characterized by a multifaced nature. In scientific literature and landscape governance, new landscape definitions are often coined to explain new meanings and to define specific intervention strategies and tools. The present study purposes a framework for the identification of hybrid landscapes as support for land-use planners, which aim to guarantee development opportunities as well as natural heritage preservation and valorization. “Marginal lands” were identified starting from EU Directives and scientific approaches, by means of multicriteria analysis. Different scenarios were built: (1) no-change; (2) energy crops; (3) green infrastructures. An ecosystem services approach, via landscape metrics analysis, was used to compare the possible effects of scenarios. About 20% of the study area, an internal area of the southern Apennines, was identified as suitable for land-use change in a medium-short time, and scenarios of land-use changes show a better condition, in terms of fragmentation, than as a current asset. Results showed the strategic role and potentialities of marginal lands, as a trade-off between nature conservation and development issues, suggesting new opportunities for green infrastructures and a renewable energies chain. The study allowed for deepening the close connection among landscape planning approaches, land use change scenarios building and environmental assessment, focused on the ex-ante evaluation stage.

Debris: Intermingling Ethnography with Design and Artistic Practice

This Gallery proposal focuses on the debris left behind by human's daily interactions with non‐human agents, with the end goal of providing arts‐infused lenses to investigate and help untangle our complex relationships with smart systems. Debris is the outcome of a process that intermingles ethnographic tactics with design probing techniques and artistic practice. The Debris – a series of art pieces resulting from this process – are offered to the EPIC 2019 community alongside artefacts that were used to inform art pieces: ethnographic data collected during the interviews, probing toolkit used to augment interview data, and the thought process of the two involved ethnographers/designers/artists, in the form of notes and sketches.This collection of art pieces, objects, visual commentaries, humans‐about‐machines accounts represent the fragments that are left behind by human interactions with smart agents ‐ we offer them to prompt reflections, re‐connections, and re‐discoveries of human‐non‐human hybrid landscapes.

Pluri-decadal (1955–2014) evolution of glacier–rock glacier transitional landforms in the central Andes of Chile (30–33° S)

Abstract. Three glacier–rock glacier transitional landforms in the central Andes of Chile are investigated over the last decades in order to highlight and question the significance of their landscape and flow dynamics. Historical (1955–2000) aerial photos and contemporary (> 2000) Geoeye satellite images were used together with common processing operations, including imagery orthorectification, digital elevation model generation, and image feature tracking. At each site, the rock glacier morphology area, thermokarst area, elevation changes, and horizontal surface displacements were mapped. The evolution of the landforms over the study period is remarkable, with rapid landscape changes, particularly an expansion of rock glacier morphology areas. Elevation changes were heterogeneous, especially in debris-covered glacier areas with large heaving or lowering up to more than ±1 m yr−1. The use of image feature tracking highlighted spatially coherent flow vector patterns over rock glacier areas and, at two of the three sites, their expansion over the studied period; debris-covered glacier areas are characterized by a lack of movement detection and/or chaotic displacement patterns reflecting thermokarst degradation; mean landform displacement speeds ranged between 0.50 and 1.10 m yr−1 and exhibited a decreasing trend over the studied period. One important highlight of this study is that, especially in persisting cold conditions, rock glaciers can develop upward at the expense of debris-covered glaciers. Two of the studied landforms initially (prior to the study period) developed from an alternation between glacial advances and rock glacier development phases. The other landform is a small debris-covered glacier having evolved into a rock glacier over the last half-century. Based on these results it is proposed that morphological and dynamical interactions between glaciers and permafrost and their resulting hybrid landscapes may enhance the resilience of the mountain cryosphere against climate change.

Approaching the issues of Urban Waterstreams Organization as a New City Landscape

AbstractNowadays many cities set priorities to shift from automobile-centered towards more bicycle and pedestrianoriented planning directions followed by high-cost infrastructure change projects. Open spaces (recommended to be 15-20% of city land) have greater importance for social interaction and relaxation especially for middle-income communities. Seoul has a historical network of Cheonggyecheon water stream and its tributaries. The transport traffic is linked it and with pedestrian and cyclist circulation along natural and artificial lines. This paper considers different conditions of existing urban pathways in Seoul through the case studies: Chyonggyecheon as a largest water stream restoration project in a city; Seongbukcheon water stream as a linear open space for local residents; Jeongreungcheon under the Naebu expressway as a hybrid landscape. This paper aims to correlate the issues of existing water streams condition, local neighborhood condition (land value change), and community planning. Cost-effective revitalizing of high-dense downtown areas is a challenge for a city that incorporates multifunctional urban environment of hybrid landscapes and community planning.

Introduction: Hybrid Landscapes: Science, Conservation, and the Production of Nature

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The articles included in this special collection examine implementation of varied conservation agendas, seeking to integrate strengths of a political ecology framework with insights derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS). By taking an ethnographic approach to study of conservation projects, they challenge nature/culture divide so central to Western philosophical tradition and draw attention to ways in which and culture are co-constituted in and through practice.In his landmark essay Ideas of Nature, Raymond Williams famously observed that the idea of contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human (1980:67). Williams traced notion of a singular, abstracted from age of antiquity to modern period, examining how it was that Nature came to be viewed as a separate realm of which humans were not a part. He notes that classical accounts defined as simply the quality of or essential constitution of (1980:68), but this view came to be refined in early Christian period, as Nature came to be understood as God's minister or deputy (1980:69).With growth of modern sciences, this understanding gradually gave way to a notion of as something with its own laws that could be understood and manipulated for benefit of humans, an idea that persists to this day (see also Guha 2000). By mid-19th century, however, growing acceptance of evolutionary theory began to unsettle idea of a stable and orderly nature. Furthermore, view of existence as a ruthless, competitive survival of fittest that accompanied this new perspective gave heightened legitimacy to increasingly stark forms of social and environmental exploitation, as inequalities produced by capitalist market economy increasingly came to be viewed as a reflection of natural order of things (Williams 1980:73; see also Johnson and Murton 2007).Paradoxically, Williams notes that it was only during this period-when capacity of humans to reshape world to suit their own ends had escalated to new heights-that conceptual separation between humans and was finally complete. The ravages of industrial society ultimately gave rise to fetishization of remote, inaccessible, and marginal landscapes, which began to be seen as places of beauty, tranquility, and primal innocence (Williams 1980:80; see also Grove 1995). As many other scholars have noted, this ethos was at heart of emergence of national parks movement in US and global protected areas movement that followed (Brockington et al. 2008, Neumann 2004, Walley 2004, West et al. 2006). This romanticization of unspoiled, pristine landscapes, however, masked degree to which many of these places had been shaped by human activity, whether consciously or not. As Williams explains: ...to speak of man 'intervening' in natural processes is to suppose that he might find it possible not to do so... (1980:74).Building upon insights of Williams and others, a number of anthropologists (Balee and Erickson 2006, Bateson 1972, Gupta 1998, Tsing 2005), environmental historians (Arnold 1996, Braudel 1992, Cronon 1983), and cultural geographers (Denevan 1992, Neumann 1998, Peet and Watts 2004, Zimmerer and Bassett 2003) have endeavored to break down binary divisions between and culture, drawing attention to degree to which human groups and their surrounding environments have been co-constituted over time. These scholars have been instrumental in challenging reified and abstracted understandings of nature as a realm outside of culture and history or an inanimate storehouse of natural resources, as well as overly deterministic accounts which presented environmental adaptation as primary driver of human social relations (Little 1999, Orlove 1980). …

Searching for an open future: planning history as a means of peri-urban landscape analysis

The paper studies the need to acknowledge planning history in order to grasp the character of contemporary landscapes. The aim of the study was to critically examine how the shadows of past planning frame the current discourse on peri-urban landscapes and, inspired by actor-network-theory, to explore the potential for new stories through a symmetrical analysis of historical planning documents. This is illustrated here using a case study of a municipality in Sweden. The paper argues that a combination of critical and creative reading could enrich the planning debate and open up new strategies for investigations and policies concerning hybrid landscapes.

Landscape and Infrastructures: Design Issues for the Integration of Parking Areas in Non-urban Contexts

This work represents a critical review of a selection of significant parking area projects chosen within the contemporary international context, aimed at discussing the role of parking architecture conceived as an opportunity to reinvent non-urban landscapes. Such an issue is part of the very topical broader theme of relationships between infrastructure and landscape, and of the various space and time scales on which landscape is perceived. Nowadays designers have to deal with several parking design opportunities related to the construction of intermodal stations, airports, shopping malls, industrial areas, as well as natural, cultural and leisure parks. Even if these places and design themes have now become usual, they still require an appropriate and original design research. Parking areas, besides their specific original function, can represent gardens and public spaces lying between the city and the countryside, capable of producing new hybrid landscapes blending art, nature and architecture.

Whose Diversity Counts? The Politics and Paradoxes of Modern Diversity

Is “diversity” a modern concept, like indigeneity or biodiversity, which is conceived precisely at the time that it seems to be threatened and on the verge of disappearing? In the face of perceived threats to diversity, projects and policies have been crafted to protect, promote, or conserve diversity, but in doing so they have often demonstrated a paradoxical propensity toward purity and authority in representations of diversity. Perceptions of “pure” natural diversity might represent native forests comprised solely of native species; “pure” cultural diversity might represent indigenous peoples who still speak indigenous languages and wear native dress. If purity is emblematic of diversity, what, then, is the place of hybrid landscapes and peoples? In our study, we draw on a range of examples—of agrobiodiversity conservation in Bolivia, satellite mapping initiatives in Madagascar and Ecuador, scientific authority about anthropogenic climate change, indigenous language and identity in Peru, and a comparison of the Amazon and Atlantic Forest in Brazil—to demonstrate gaps between representations of diversity, and the heterogeneous local realities they obscure. We suggest that hybridity is a form of diversity unto itself—albeit a form of diversity that is more complex, and thus harder to codify and categorize.

Hydropower landscapes and tourism development in the Pyrenees

Since the development of hydroelectric power at the end of the 19th century, most of the high mountain valleys in the Pyrenees have been equipped with hydropower facilities (dams, water intake structures, aqueducts, penstocks, access routes, etc.). Thus, today many landscapes in the Pyrenees bear witness to the exploitation of this renewable resource. But in the classical imaginary world, these mountain areas are seen as the archetype of the beautiful natural landscape, in accordance with aesthetic values inherited from the 18th century, setting Man against Nature. In this model of representations, the cultural heritage of high mountain areas remains in the shadow of their natural heritage. However, since the beginning of the 20th century, it can be shown that the development of mountain tourism has been closely linked with the development of hydroelectric power infrastructures. This runs counter to these prejudices and may well give rise to new ways of looking at these hybrid landscapes. The cross-border comparison of the Neouvielle and Encantats massifs in the Pyrenees reveals that their hydropower resources are exploited in the same way, but that heritage aspects are managed differently: dismantling of ancillary installations at the dams with a view to protecting the so-called “natural” landscapes in the Neouvielle massif, as opposed to rehabilitating and converting this heritage in the Encantats massifs with a view to developing a form of tourism that takes into account the hybrid nature of the vestiges visible in today’s landscape.

Spatial Order, Scenic Landscapes and Sprawl: Peri-urban Studies at the Interface between Landscape and Planning History

Introduction to this Special Section by Guest Editors: Hybrid landscapes at the urban edge have been regarded as an intractable problem within modern planning for more than a century (Qvistrom, in ...