Classification of cultural landscapes in the Natura 2000 protected areas network: the importance of agroforestry

Key words: cultural landscapes, culturalness, protected areas, landscape assessment, cultural ecosystem services

Vassiliki

Ioannis

Vlami

P. Kokkoris

Collaborator of the ELLINIKI ETAIRIA - Society for the Environment and Cultural Heritage, Tripodon 28, 10558, Athens, vas.vlami@gmail.com

Department of Biology, Division of Plant Biology, University of Patras, 26504, Patras, ipkokkoris@upatras.gr

Introduction

Cultural landscapes refer to semi-natural and natural formations that have been shaped over long periods of time by traditional human land uses. Most cultural landscapes also include agroforestry with various vegetation types that are largely dependent on traditional rural land management, including agricultural and livestock grazing activities. This brief review presents cultural landscapes in the EU Natura 2000 network sites of Greece and emphasizes the important role of agroforestry systems in their inventory and management.

In the last 50 years, there has been widespread abandonment of traditional land uses in Greece (e.g. mountain agriculture, traditional terraced crops, transhumance livestock grazing, etc.) as well as extensive changes due to agricultural intensification, urban sprawl, road expansion and many other changes that often degrade the quality of landscapes. In many cases, the agroforestry systems that are important in shaping cultural landscapes have also changed and lost their original integrity. The identification, evaluation and mapping of cultural landscapes are cornerstones for the proper management of biodiversity and for sustaining the multiple values of landscapes, especially in Mediterranean-type climate areas (Ispikoudis 2005, Vlami et al. 2017).

An important problem in Greece regarding the cultural landscape and agroforestry systems in particular is the lack of a complete inventory and classification framework. The term “classification” refers to the organized categorization of areas, landscapes and administrative units (e.g. protected areas) for the purpose of their inventory, monitoring, management and protection. The aim of classification should include the provision of a practical framework for synthesizing and analyzing multiple sources of information. This process and the products it creates (conceptual models, maps, etc.) helps increase understanding and facilitate proper management of complex multifunctional landscapes.

Agroforestry systems are cultural landscapes. Their inventory and classification must be completed

Such research and management needs have a high degree of complexity and there is inadequate experience in Greece. This also results from the fact that there was almost no tradition of managing traditional cultural landscapes as protected areas in Greece. The reasons for this long-standing conservation “omission” relate to the anachronistic view which supports that biodiversity in the Mediterranean basin must be strictly related to “natural” or mainly forested areas. Shortly before 2000, the core management theory was that the entire Mediterranean basin is dominated by “ruined landscapes” that were degraded by the destructive succession of civilizations and no longer have anything to do with the primordial nature of the region. This simplistic view is incorrect (as discussed in Rackham & Moody 1996 and Grove and Rackham 2001). Many typical Mediterranean landscapes are rich in biodiversity because of the complex small-scale traditional land uses; and, these landscapes often include many patches of ”wild nature” as well. Calls to develop a new approach to the management of traditional cultural landscapes combined with the support of biodiversity have been gaining attention in recent years (Catsadorakis 2007).

Until recently, cultural landscapes have been little explored in protected areas. In Greece, simple cartographic analyses have shown the true nature of the country’s protected areas. A rough dichotomy between “cultural” and “natural” landscapes utilizing simple geographical criteria proves how pervasive the presence of human land uses is within the Natura 2000 network of Greece (Figure 1). As expected, nearly all protected areas in Greece are dominated by several varieties of cultural landscapes. These cultural land cover formations show the high level of “culturalness” within Greece’s protected areas.

The concept of “culturalness” is a geographical attribute where humans have influenced the long-term evolution of land cover formations, habitat types, or even entire areas. It was developed and applied for the first time in our review of Natura 2000 terrestrial protected areas (Vlami et al., 2017) in Greece (Figure 2). The complete inventory of culturalness attributes is certainly more complex than this screeninglevel analysis shows, but this evaluation and classification provides a heuristic method for developing broad scale interpretations. To get more deeply involved in the “cultural-biophysical” nuances and conservation-relevant management of each protected area requires a narrower spatial scale at the level of individual landscapes.

Figure 2. Classification map of the Natura 2000 network based on the degree of cultural values (e.g. traditional land uses, livestock grazing, active rural villages, high nature value farming). The exercise of multi-criteria analysis results in a degree of “culturalness” for each protected area (high to low). Classification steps are discussed in Vlami et al. (2017).

© Vassiliki Vlami

Figure 1. The distribution of cultural and natural landscape formations in the terrestrial part of the Natura 2000 network of Greece. Classification is depicted using specific landcover categories (scrubland, grasslands, agricultural land, etc.) as indicators of cultural landscape modification. At the time of this assessment 66.7 % of the terrestrial Natura 2000 network cover of Greece’s network was covered by cultural landscape formations (Vlami et al. 2017). © Vassiliki Vlami