Cultural Landscape Essay

A ethnic propscape is a piece of land that possesses graphic and cultural resources related to an historic event, person, or group of people. They ar commonly man-made lexis of relationships with the nature and/or society or culture. These batch embarrass grand estates, public gardens and parks, educational institutions, cemeteries, highways, and industrial sites. Cultural graces are besides humanist works of art, texts and narratives of cultures that express regional and cultural identity.They to a fault evidence relationship to their ecologic perspective. human race activities have turned out to be a major ca use of shaping most cultivated beautify paintings on the surface of Earth. Human, animal and machine labor expended in using the land provide create outstanding cultural beautifys with high aesthetic, cultural and ecologic value such as the paddy-field rice terraces of south-east Asia, but whitethorn as intumesce result in land degradation as is the case in s ome regions in the Mediterranean.The distribution of landforms such as steep slopes, fertile plains, inundated valleys in a beautify sets the draw for land use by determining factors such as accessibility, pee and nutrient availability, but whitethorn over long periods of time also be changed through land use. On the some other hand, land use serves distinct socio-economic purposes land may supply materials and qualification through hunting, kitchen-gardening or forestry, it may host infra coordinate, or it may be involve to absorb waste and emissions (Haberl et al., 2004). dirtscapes croupe be seen as the contingent and historically variable outcome of this inter evasive action between socio-economic and biophysical forces. During the evolution of cultural landscapes throughout the world, valet have developed adaptive land-use techniques and created precise patterns of fields, farmsteads, remnant woodlots and the like that depended on both congenital and socio-economic conditions.In European agricultural landscapes, the long chronicle of land transformation has led to regionally distinct regular patterns of geometrically arranged landscape elements, reflecting the historical and cultural terra firma of the prevailing land-use administration of a region (Bell, 1999). The spatial distribution of ecotopes, the so-called landscape structure, has and then often 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 reach a central paradigm in modern landscape ecology. eyepatch many 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 judge ecological aspects of the sustainability of land-use patterns (Wrbka et al. , 1999b). The Influence Of Land Form On The posture Of Land Use Cultural landscapes have, in contrast to natural and semi-natural landscapes, special characteristics.The disturbance regime 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 different land-use practices use for meadows, arable land or forests. Decisions about land use are made according to the local agro-ecological characteristics which are nested in a hierarchy of social, economical and technical constraints. Cultural landscapes can thus only be understood by analyzing the interplay between biophysical and socioeconomic patterns and processes. decorate 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 identical region in the 1980s. During the same period of time the use of fertilizers, pesticides and other agrochemicals increased dramatically. This illust stations that the growing human impact on the land may result in a landscape with decreasing geometrical complexness. Human activities introduce rectangularity and rectilinearity into landscapes, producing regular gos with straight borders (Forman, 1999 Forman and Moore, 1992).Various studies suggest that the rate of landscape transformation is a function 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 reductions with increasing land-use intensity come with by a decrease of habitat heterogeneity and an increase of exertion units. Applying the thermodynamic laws to landscape structure, Forman and Moore (1992) suggested that the concentrated input of energy (e. g., by tractor ploughing, whole shebang payoff, wildfire) decreases the entropy of patches compared to adjacent areas and produces straight a nd abrupt boundaries. In other words, energy is require to convert natural curvilinear 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 center 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 rankness 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 step of land-use intensity seems to be also a good predictor of species mellowness (Moser et al. , 2002 Wrbka et al. , 1999a). Accordingly, higher species wideness in areas with high LD and natality values can be expected.The use of shape complex ity indices as indicators for plant species richness is based on an assumed correlation 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 answerable for the decrease of landscape complexity with increasing land-use intensity, which resulted in the following divulge findings* The majority of landscape elements in agricultural landscapes are designed 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 natur al curvilinear boundaries.* Intensification in agriculture tends to increase the size of end product 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 clearly the interdependence of biodiversity and landscape heterogeneity, bring on by closely interwoven ecological, demographical, socio-economic and cultural factors.For an effective conservation steering of biodiversity and landscape eco-diversity, a clear understanding of the ecological and cultural processes and their perturbations is essential. modal(a) 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 important role for landscape conservation planning. The understanding of landscape processes is all-important(a) for the conservation of both, landscape eco-diversity and biodiversity.Conclusions From a conservation biology point of view, the on-going 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 key processes is under investigation. Works Cited Alard, D. , Poudevigne, I. Factors controlling plant diversity in country-bred landscapes a functional approach. 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. even processes, roads, suburbs, societal objectives in landscape ecology. In Klopatek, M. , Gardner, R. H. (Eds. ), Landscape Ecological summary 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 simple 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, sou-west Finland. Landscape and Urban Planning , 1999 46, 103108. Luoto, M.. Modelling of rare plant species richness by landscape variables in an agriculture area in Finland. define 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.