Sustainable Ecosystem Services in Cultural Landscapes: Recent Trends and Future Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue focuses on how ecosystem services produce important socioeconomic and ecological effects on cultural landscapes and their sustainability, emphasizing both current actions and future initiatives and proposals. We kindly invite you to participate in this interesting topic to achieve the objectives of sustainable territorial development in cultural landscapes.

We can find the origin of the cultural landscape notion in the works of Carl O. Sauer and the Berkeley School (in the first third of the 20th century).  Since then, cultural landscape has been understood as the territorial synthesis of the interaction across time between a specific social group (identified by its techniques, beliefs, and values) with its natural environment (“Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result”, The Morphology of Landscape 1925). More recently, cultural landscape has been defined, in a similar vein, as the current state of an unfinished evolution of the relationship between society and natural environment (Bertrand and Bertrand, 2002). This evolution is performed by:

1. The dynamic combination established between abiotic, biotic and anthropic factors;
2. The social perception of this combination.

Regarding ecosystem services, this concept is disseminated in the framework of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis, 2005) as well as by different authors (Haines-Young, R. & Potschin, M., 2010).

Ecosystem services can be defined as the benefits that people eventually derive from the ecological structures and processes created by living organisms. Among the different ecosystem services, we can highlight cultural services provided due to the recognition of intangible assets linked to places, ecosystems and agro-systems. In this way, cultural ecosystem services match with, among other activities: scientific knowledge; environmental and patrimonial education; outdoor recreation (agro-tourism and eco-tourism); and social and personal fulfilment. Besides that, appreciation by urban populations can strengthen rural identity and belonging.

The links between ecosystem services, biodiversity, sustainability and human well-being are also explicitly manifested in the official texts themselves in which the definition of the category of cultural landscape is qualified: “Protection of cultural landscapes can contribute to modern techniques of sustainable land-use and can maintain or enhance natural values in the landscape.” (The Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, Annex 3, UNESCO, 1992). This approach has been developed, among others, by D. Raffaelli and C. Frieds (Ecosystem Ecology: A New Synthesis, 2010).

Hence, it seems adequate to assume, as a novel approach, that ecosystem services can reconcile the preservation of cultural landscapes with sustainable land use. As long as many cultural landscapes concern agro-systems preceding industrial economy, their continuing functioning should align with the preservation of both ecological processes and heritage values linked to pre-industrial habitats and engineering (traditional irrigation systems, terraces, saltworks, grazing areas, traditional rural and urban architecture, etc.).

This alignment relies on the economic rationale of farm activities that is threatened by different factors such as its location in peri-urban areas, the lack of labour force in depopulated deep rural areas and its low income. Moreover, heritage preservation under museum management has not proved particularly successful, as it lacks continuity arising from its dependence of public funds.

Thus, this theoretic standpoint faces multiple challenges in order to be implemented by land management:  How is it being encompassed by planning? What kind of planning is it: integrated, urban, sectorial or environmental? Has its implementation as a financial reward acted as a farm income supplement? Are there good practices in the alignment of production, heritage and environmental preservation (the Land Stewardship Network)?

This Special Issue is expected to feature how cultural landscapes and sustainable ecosystem services are linked and how they can be treated both from scholar and planning scopes. We would also like to gather study cases that can help to identify what are the mainstream challenges and responses about the acknowledgement of sustainable ecosystem services provided by the cultural landscape.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Prof. Dr. Carmen Delgado-Viñas
Prof. Dr. María L. Gómez-Moreno
Prof. Dr. Marta Martínez-Arnáiz
Prof. Dr. Eugenio Baraja-Rodríguez
Prof. Dr. Álvaro Daniel Rodríguez Escudero
Guest Editors

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