Human activities and biodiversity opportunities in pre-industrial cultural landscapes: relevance to conservation

What is it about?

In Europe, most habitats of conservation importance were formed and shaped by centuries of human management. To support important biodiversity, conservation management generally mimics ‘traditional’ management of these semi-natural habitats - but with only a limited understanding of history. In a novel collaboration between conservation ecologists and landscape historians, we bring together ecological knowledge of biodiversity needs with new understanding of pre-industrial land management (of lowland England c. 1200–1750). Historic management involved intense exploitation; substantial harvest of biomass; complex nested structural heterogeneity (both between and within landscape patches) and multiple land-uses overlaid on the same patch. Grazing patterns are particularly poorly understood but were often intensive. Early-successional and disturbed microhabitats may have been widespread but ungrazed or lightly grazed herb-rich vegetation was probably rare, the opposite of current conservation management. The key changes to the present are ecological/structural simplification at multiple scales, loss of heterogeneity and accumulation of nutrients. In echoing ‘traditional’ management modern conservation rarely achieves the range and complexity of conditions that were present in the past. History was highly variable – in both time and space – so ideas of a stable ‘traditional’ practice are inaccurate and any base-line or reference point is arbitrary. Better historic understanding places greater emphasis on the importance of complex structural and spatial heterogeneity at nested scales, physical disturbance, biomass removal and nutrient reduction – the same features that ecology shows are key to effective biodiversity conservation.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Rules of thumb to guide conservation, that cut across species and habitats, are: focusing on structural complexity and heterogeneity at nested spatial scales; physical disturbance and exposure of mineral substrate; nutrient removal; lengthened successional rotations; and spatial variation in grazing regimes. These approaches can reconcile rewilding and cultural landscape conservation to benefit biodiversity.

Perspectives