Cultural Landscape Essay

A cultural stainscape is a piece of land that possesses natural and cultural resources related to an historic event, person, or group of people. They are usually man-made lexis of relationships with the nature and/or society or culture. These can include grand estates, public gardens and parks, educational institutions, cemeteries, highways, and industrial sites. pagan landscapes are also humanist works of art, texts and narratives of cultures that express regional and cultural identity.They also present relationship to their ecological perspective. Human activities have turned unwrap to be a major cause of shaping most cultivated landscapes on the surface of Earth. Human, animal and machine labor expended in using the land can create outstanding cultural landscapes with high aesthetic, cultural and ecological value such as the paddy-field rice terraces of south-east Asia, but may as easily result in land humiliation as is the case in some regions in the Mediterranean.The dist ribution of landforms such as steep slopes, potent plains, inundated valleys in a landscape sets the frame for land use by determining factors such as accessibility, water and nutrient availability, but may over long periods of time also be changed through land use. On the otherwise hand, land use serves distinct socio-economic purposes land may make out materials and energy through hunting, agriculture or forestry, it may host infrastructure, or it may be needed to absorb waste and emissions (Haberl et al., 2004). place downscapes can be seen as the contingent and historically variable outcome of this interplay between socio-economic and biophysical forces. During the evolution of cultural landscapes throughout the world, humans have developed adaptive land-use techniques and created specific patterns of fields, farmsteads, remnant woodlots and the exchangeable that depended on both natural and socio-economic conditions.In European agricultural landscapes, the long history of land transformation has led to regionally distinct regular patterns of geometrically arranged landscape elements, reflecting the historical and cultural soil of the prevailing land-use system of a region (Bell, 1999). The spatial distribution of ecotopes, the so-called landscape structure, has therefore lots been regarded as a mosaic of frozen processes i. e. landscape structure assumedly mirrors the processes which had been going on in a landscape.This perception has even become a primaeval paradigm in modern landscape ecology. While more ecosystem processes are difficult to observe directly, landscape structure can be derived from mapping as well as from remote-sensing data therefore, landscape structure was often not only used to evaluate the ecological value of landscapes, but also to sound out ecological aspects of the sustainability of land-use patterns (Wrbka et al. , 1999b). The Influence Of Land Form On The Intensity Of Land riding habit Cultural landscapes have, in c ontrast to natural and semi-natural landscapes, special characteristics.The disturbance regimen as well as the major material and energy fluxes in these transformed landscapes is controlled to a large extent by humans. This is done by the dissimilar land-use practices applied for meadows, arable land or forests. Decisions most land use are made according to the local agro-ecological characteristics which are nested in a power structure of social, economical and technical constraints. Cultural landscapes can thus only be netherstood by analyzing the interplay between biophysical and socioeconomic patterns and processes. adorn Structure And Intensity Of Land UseOdum and Turner (1989) found that the landscape elements of the Georgia landscape in the early 1930s had a higher fractal dimension than the elements of the same region in the 1980s. During the same period of time the use of fertilizers, pesticides and other agrochemicals increased dramatically. This illustrates that the gr owing human impact on the land may result in a landscape with decreasing geometrical complexity. Human activities introduce rectangularity and rectilinearity into landscapes, producing regular solves with straight borders (Forman, 1999 Forman and Moore, 1992).Various studies suggest that the rate of landscape transformation is a turn tail of land-use intensity (Alard and Poudevigne, 1999 Hietala-Koivu, 1999 Mander et al. , 1999 Odum and Turner, 1989), and that the geometric complexity of a landscape in particular decreases with increasing land-use intensity attended by a decrease of habitat heterogeneity and an increase of production units. Applying the thermodynamic laws to landscape structure, Forman and Moore (1992) suggested that the concentrated input of energy (e. g., by tractor ploughing, plant production, wildfire) decreases the entropy of patches compared to adjacent areas and produces straight and abrupt boundaries. In other words, energy is required to convert natural c urvilinear boundaries into straight lines and energy is required to maintain them. The reduction of the energy input increases entropy and revegetation convolutes and softens landscape boundaries. This factor that the landscape structure, in the sense of Forman and Godron (1986), can be regarded as frozen processes. Landscape Structure And BiodiversityMany surveys show that species richness of vascular plants and bryophytes normally decreases with land-use intensity (Luoto, 2000 Mander et al. , 1999 Zechmeister and Moser, 2001 Zechmeister et al. , 2003). As the link between landscape structure and land-use intensity could be established, shape complexity as a measure of land-use intensity seems to be also a good predictor of species richness (Moser et al. , 2002 Wrbka et al. , 1999a). Accordingly, higher species richness in areas with high LD and richness values can be expected.The use of shape complexity indices as indicators for plant species richness is based on an assumed corre lation between geometric landscape complexity and biodiversity (Moser et al. , 2002). Obviously, this correlation is not mechanistic but it is supposed to be due to congruent effects of land-use intensity on landscape shape complexity and species richness. Moser et al. (2002) gives a good literature overview about the driving factors responsible for the decrease of landscape complexity with increasing land-use intensity, which resulted in the following key findings* The majority of landscape elements in agricultural landscapes are knowing by humans as rectangles with straight and distinct boundaries (Forman, 1999). * Outside boundaries of semi-natural or natural patches are straightened by neighboring cultivated areas (). * Increasing land-use intensity is accompanied by a decrease of semi-natural and natural areas (Alard and Poudevigne, 1999 Mander et al. , 1999), resulting in a decrease of natural curvilinear boundaries.* Intensification in agriculture tends to increase the size of production units (Alard and Poudevigne, 1999 Hietala-Koivu, 1999). In addition to that intensification of land use on the production unit, e. g. , by fertilizing or increased mowing intensity, also leads to a dramatic decrease of the species richness (Zechmeister et al. , 2003). The description of the degradation of semi-natural and agricultural landscapes shows pull inly the interdependence of biodiversity and landscape heterogeneity, induced by closely interwoven ecological, demographical, socio-economic and cultural factors.For an effective conservation management of biodiversity and landscape eco-diversity, a clear understand of the ecological and cultural processes and their perturbations is essential. Intermediate disturbance levels lead to a highly complex and diverse cultural landscape which can host many plant and animal species. Landscapes, with eco-diversity hotspots, can be regarded as hint for biodiversity hotspots. Landscape pattern indicators therefore play an im portant role for landscape conservation planning. The understanding of landscape processes is crucial for the conservation of both, landscape eco-diversity and biodiversity.Conclusions From a conservation biology point of view, the ongoing process of genetic erosion and biodiversity loss as well as the replacement of specific recognizable cultural landscapes by monotonous ubiquistic production sites will continue. The biophysical characteristics and natural constraints of the investigated landscapes are interwoven with the regional historic and socio-economical development. This interplay is the background for the development of a variety of cultural landscapes which have their own specific characteristics. Geo-ecological land-units provide one solution.This is of special importance when the relationship of landscape patterns and underlying processes is under investigation. Works Cited Alard, D. , Poudevigne, I. Factors controlling plant diversity in rural landscapes a functional ap proach. Landscape and Urban Planning, 1999 46, 2939 Bell, S. , LandscapePattern, Perception and Process. E. &F. N. Spon, London, 1999 Forman, R. T. T. , & Godron, M. Landscape Ecology. Wiley, New York, 1986. Forman, R. T. T. , & Moore, P. N. Theoretical foundations for understanding boundaries in landscape mosaics.In Hansen, F. J. , Castri, F. (Eds. ), Landscape Boundaries. Consequences for Biotic Diversity and Ecological Flows. Springer, New York, 1992, pp. 236258. Forman, R. T. T. Horizontal processes, roads, suburbs, societal objectives in landscape ecology. In Klopatek, M. , Gardner, R. H. (Eds. ), Landscape Ecological Analysis Issues and Applications. Springer, New York, 1999, pp. 3553. Haberl, H. , Wackernagel, M. , Krausmann, F. , Erb, K. -H. , Monfreda, C. Ecological footprints and human appropriation of net primary production A comparison.Land Use Policy, doi10. 1016/ j. landusepol. 2003. 10. 008. , 2004 Hietala-Koivu, R. Agricultural landscape change a case study in Y lane , Southwest Finland. Landscape and Urban Planning , 1999 46, 103108. Luoto, M.. Modelling of exalted plant species richness by landscape variables in an agriculture area in Finland. Plant Ecology , 2000 149, 157168. Mander, U. , Mikk, M. , Ku. lvik, M.. Ecological and low intensity agriculture as contributors to landscape and biological diversity. Landscape and Urban Planning , 1999 46, 169177.