Poster Session (Asynchronous): TERRANOVA - The Sustainable European Landscape Learning Initiative
The Future of Abandoned Agricultural Lands: An Inventory of Alternative Trajectories in Europe View Digital Media
Poster Session Catherine Fayet
In recent decades, agricultural land abandonment has strongly impacted landscape features in many European rural areas. Drivers and consequences of abandonment are now well understood, yet few studies describe what happens to agricultural lands after abandonment. Therefore, to understand how these lands can provide opportunities to develop alternative uses that address environmental, economic, and social challenges faced in rural areas, it is necessary to identify the driving forces leading to different post-agricultural abandonment trajectories. We reviewed the literature of the different trajectories observed after agricultural abandonment and identified their related drivers. From the literature evidence, we developed a conceptual framework illustrating the different trajectories found after abandonment and analysed them in terms of landscape outcomes. For most reported cases, abandoned lands transitioned towards semi-natural landscapes while a minority returned to different agricultural uses. The most common driving force was the withdrawal of land management, where spontaneous vegetation succession processes led to semi-natural landscapes. Quality and state of these landscapes were variable. The development of alternative trajectories was mainly supported by institutional and socio-economic drivers within the biophysical constraints and opportunities of the areas for (re-)afforestation, re-farming, and multi-functional uses after abandonment. Building on evidence across case studies, this research shows that while abandoned lands can provide opportunities to respond to current environmental and climate policy goals, adequate resources with institutional and socio-economic incentives are essential to support land management options that mitigate potential trade-offs and contribute to favourable rural and environmental conditions.
A Long-term View of Nature and Culture in Decision Making: Are Spatially Explicit Scenarios Effective for Land Management? View Digital Media
Poster Session Roberta Rigo
Imagine arriving in an unknown city, you are disorientated and confused, but you know there are plenty of attractions to discover. You open a tourist guide, you look at the alternatives and you chose a place, that’s where you want to go. Now you need a transport map to show you the way and you are finally ready to move. In the literature, many studies claim that land use scenarios can be valuable guides and maps to show possible futures and how to act to go towards the one you chose. However, very few studies verified if these scenarios are guiding the political decisions and which is their real impact on decision making. The main goal of my research project is hence to evaluate the effects and the usefulness of scenarios on the decision-making process according to three variables: the different stakeholders’ group (technicians, politicians, and farmers), the way scenarios are constructed and presented to the final-end users, and the evaluation moment. The last aim is to provide practical recommendations to support researchers in every stage of making scenarios, boosting the translation of scenarios into different land management actions. Starting from a long-term ex-post evaluation of land use change scenario, we analyze their impacts on different stakeholders’ groups finding that they were strongly influenced by the way they are constructed, and the dissemination effort carried out after the study. The political environment, and its instability also represented a considerable barrier to translate scenarios into action.
Assessing Vegetation Openness During the Last Interglacial and the Early-middle Holocene in Europe: Preliminary Agent-based Model Design View Digital Media
Poster Session Anastasia Nikulina, Fulco Scherjon
This study presents the design of an Agent-Based Model (ABM) for understanding vegetation openness during the Last Interglacial (LIG, ~ 130,000-116,000 BP) and the Early-Middle Holocene (~11,700-6,000 BP) in Europe. Modelling consist of three main steps. Firstly, input data is collected (digital elevation models, topographic features, climatic and vegetation reconstructions, megafauna distribution), and LIG and Holocene environments are reconstructed. Secondly, model parameters and interaction between three main agents (hunter-gatherers, megafauna, and climate) impacting landscapes in different ways are designed. Thirdly, after simulating the interaction between agents and vegetation for a given time period, the results (scenarios) are statistically analysed and validated against palynological and/or archaeological data sets. Finally, the most influential factors leading to vegetation openness are identified, and role of each agent in vegetation openness is clarified. Results for the LIG are compared with data for the Holocene. This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813904.
From the Hunter-gatherer Subsistence Strategies to the Agricultural Non-revolution: Using Energy Regimes to Reform the "Stack" of Cultural Phases View Digital Media
Poster Session Alexandre Martinez, César Borja Barrera, María Esperanza Roldán Muñoz, José Muñoz Rojas, Sjoerd J. Kluiving
The TERRANOVA project aims to help policy makers and stakeholders cope with the transition towards low carbon societies. Improving existing knowledge of past land-use strategies will allow TERRANOVA partners to have a long-term understanding of the landscape dynamics. From the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) onwards in NW Iberia, gradual softening of climate conditions allowed hunter-gatherer societies to broaden their resource exploitation, based on the Guided Solar Energy Regime (ER1). As the environment and resources evolved with time, the subsistence strategies remained the same, only changing with the Neolithization. This transition to a novel Devised Solar Energy Regime (ER2) based on food production, would largely impact the landscapes. Human societies would soon need new resources and energies to sustain their never-ending evolution, and more importantly, to deal with the consequences of their impact on their own landscapes. An archaeological database mainly based on radiocarbon dating has been constructed and analysed at different spatial and temporal scales, in order to identify and characterize ER1 and its transition to ER2. Focusing on energy regimes allows us to see the “loop” of subsistence strategies, always creating new demands by filling the previous ones, instead of a “stack” of cultural phases. It then helps archaeologists to better understand the continuity in past societies through time. Our World is no exception to this loop. Exploiting fossil fuel has solved many issues but also created new ones. The transition to green energies and allowing the environment to recover is the next step in the loop.
How to Reconcile Nature and Agriculture in Europe: Prioritizing areas for agricultural intensification, extensification and abandonment View Digital Media
Poster Session Leen Felix
Land sparing and sharing are two strategies for the large-scale reconciliation of food production and nature conservation. Land sharing promotes the adoption of wildlife-friendly farming practices, reducing management intensity and generally compromising on yields, increasing the total space allocated to food production. Land sparing advocates the opposite in order to maximize space for nature. In reality, the optimal strategy is context dependent because the impacts of intensification, extensification, and abandonment on biodiversity and ecosystem services vary significantly across Europe. Hence, the efficiency of agriculture and nature conservation policies can be considerably improved by reflecting this spatial variation in desirability. The aim of this research is to quantify and assess spatial variation in the potential impacts of the transitions of agricultural land towards intensive agriculture, wildlife-friendly agriculture or nature on 10 different ecosystem service and biodiversity indicators. Analyzing the cost and benefits of each transition, we then highlight areas of low and high desirability of each transition.
Rewilding in the Decade of Restoration: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Promote Social and Ecological Benefits of Rewilding in European Landscapes View Digital Media
Poster Session Rowan Dunn Capper, Josiane Segar, Laura Catalina Quintero Uribe
Rewilding is an emerging strategy in ecological restoration that aims to restore self-sustaining complex ecosystems characterised by minimal human intervention. As we enter the UN Decade on Restoration, rewilding has increasingly been highlighted as having the potential to upscale restoration to meet sustainability goals and simultaneously reconnect humans with nature. However, further integrative research is needed to help define rewilding implementation strategies in such an applied topic. The long-term aim of our combined work is to address critical research gaps in rewilding science and practice. Firstly, by developing participatory scenarios to portrait different management options that inform possible ecological and societal outcomes of rewilding. Second, examining the ecological trajectories that result from the implementation of rewilding projects, and finally, studying the socio-economic benefits of rewilding over time. Here, we present the early results of our interdisciplinary work. From a social perspective we outline a synthesis study of how the future of nature in Europe has been envisioned in ecosystem restoration narratives, and what elements of rewilding are being included in these. While using expert-based and data-driven monitoring approaches, we can understand both the landscape changes occurring across European sites, as well as the ecological factors important for rewilding progress. Moreover, understanding the economic potential of rewilding can help to implement sustainable funding structures that increase the chances a given project will persist over time. Together this integrative work presents a strong policy case for how rewilding can be progressed in a scientifically rigorous way in the future.
Modeling Biome Distribution of Two Periods with Contrasting Climatic Conditions of the Holocene View Digital Media
Poster Session Anhelina Zapolska, Frank Arthur
The climate of Europe underwent substantial changes throughout the Holocene (11.5–0 kyr BP). The climate during the mid-Holocene (6 kyr BP) was significantly warmer than the pre-industrial climate (0.1 kyr BP). Studying the biome distribution of these periods allows us to analyse the role of vegetation in the climate system response to these natural forcings and to better project vegetation behaviour in present-day warming. In this work, conducted within the framework of the TerraNova project, we present a modeling approach, which simulates climate and biome distribution of the two mentioned periods. The main objectives of this study are to investigate biome distribution of two periods with contrasting climatic conditions of the Holocene, and to analyse the impact of downscaling on prediction of biome distribution in Europe during the studied periods. The results of our study show spatial patterns of biome distribution of the two studied periods, and create a baseline for studying landscape transformations in combination with other factors, such as influence of human activities. The downscaling provides more detailed information on the spatial variability of biomes distribution, which is more suitable to study the local-scale processes compared to the coarse grid. This information is relevant for other partners of the TerraNova project who work at a local/regional scale. Our study contributes to better understanding of the vegetation-climate feedback of the past, which is important to investigate how the vegetation changes affect the local climate, and essential for studying human-environment interactions and developing strategies for sustainable solutions.
Balancing Nature and Culture in Southeast European Landscape Evolution and Integrated Legacies View Digital Media
Poster Session Emily Vella
While archaeology researches the past, it is often applied to current events, such as land rights and ownership disputes, reviving and preserving cultural traditions, and establishing a framework for current social issues. Climate change is by no means a new phenomenon, but the current human-accelerated climate change has moved discussions of sustainability to the forefront. Balancing Nature and Culture in Southeast European Landscape Evolutions and Integrated Legacies looks to the past to inform the future. My research project studies long-term human settlement patterns in southern Romania, with a special focus on the Romanian Carpathians and the Danube Delta. These areas are particularly sensitive to environmental changes and have seen a decrease in biodiversity, which researchers are attempting to counter through conservation and rewilding initiatives. The archaeological perspective that this project provides is essential to understanding how landscapes have developed over time, how past peoples used the landscape and the resources it provided, and how past people dealt with changes in the climate and environment. This project has three goals: 1. Study human settlement patterns from the Paleolithic into the Middle Ages 2. Understand the role of fluvial systems as pathways (or waterways) between different landscapes types and ecosystems 3. Identify the drivers of human-environment interactions and evaluating if past land management systems can be used in the present as more sustainable practices. These goals are considered within a wider context of creating a sustainable future and sustainable archaeology.
Balancing Nature and Culture In Northwest European Landscape Evolution: Historical Ecology of Energy Regimes View Digital Media
Poster Session Kailin Hatlestad
Unprecedented changes are occurring in our natural systems caused by human action. How should humans prepare for these changes? Keys to this question may be found in records of the human past. Taking a historical ecological approach to the data mining and synthesizing of radiocarbon and archaeological records from major northwest European river catchment areas has potential to intimately inform us of past human land use near these topographically unifying fluvial systems. Exploring land use over large temporal and spatial time spans, and consequently transformations in primary resource reliance, through the spatial analysis tools offered by GIS software provides a foundation for generating responses to the unparalleled environmental changes anthropogenic action has set in motion. Correlating changes in human activity to changes in the environment can identify where improvements to the reciprocal human-environment relationship may be made or where harmful consequences may be avoided.
