International policies and guidelines often highlight the divide between ‘nature’ and ‘heritage’ in landscape management, and the weakness of monodisciplinary approaches. This study argues that historic agricultural practices have played a key role in shaping today’s landscapes, creating a heritage which affords opportunities for more sustainable landscape management. The paper develops a new interdisciplinary approach with particular reference to soil loss and degradation over the long term. It presents innovative methods for assessing and modelling how pre-industrial agricultural features can mitigate soil erosion risk in response to current environmental conditions. Landscape archaeology data presented through Historic Landscape Characterisation are integrated in a GIS-RUSLE model to illustrate the impact of varying historic land-uses on soil erosion. The resulting analyses could be used to inform strategies for sustainable land resource planning.
Land degradation is a critical environmental issue worldwide. The latest projections on climate change indicate that increasingly severe storm intensity and runoff will induce greater soil losses by water erosion in the future than in the past decades. The ‘FAO Global Symposium on Soil Erosion’ underlined how soil degradation can be accelerated by human activities, with substantial implications for future land productivity, rural livelihoods and biodiversity. Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) dynamics are the major anthropogenic drivers of soil loss and degradation.
The benefits of leveraging landscape ecology and heritage together have been increasingly recognised by policy-makers and reflected in schemes to promote environmental management. Policy-makers and land managers need tools which they can use to model and compare the likely effectiveness of different options before implementing conservation or other management schemes. This paper presents an example of such a method which is designed to assess the relationship between historic field boundaries and the management of soil erosion.
Several methods have been employed to measure, estimate and monitor soil erosion both at field and landscape scales. Computer-based modelling can provide a quantitative and consistent approach to estimate soil erosion under a wide range of conditions. Soil erosion modelling is one of the most versatile tools for planning suitable soil protection measures and detecting erosion hotspots both at local and landscape scales. In particular, the integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with the Revisited Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) model has been widely applied to estimate soil loss in various geographical contexts.
Among pre-industrial agricultural practices, the creation of field boundaries (e.g. stone walls, hedgerows, earth banks, lynchets) has proved an effective means to prevent or at least limit the process of soil erosion. Recently a novel P-factor model for Europe has been developed from the data retrieved during a statistical survey that recorded the occurrence of stone walls and grass margins in EU countries. Although it represents one of the first attempts to consider cultural landscape features of these kinds in a soil erosion model at a continental scale, several limitations were highlighted by the authors, including the limited number of points surveyed and the interpolation technique selected.
Landscape archaeology has the potential to fill this gap in the data about soil conservation practices using a GIS-based tool called Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC). HLC is an archaeological approach which is used to map landscapes with particular reference to their long-term development by systematically interpreting their components (e.g. scale, morphology and pattern of fields, boundaries, roads, settlements, etc.). HLC permits archaeologists to record information about changing LULC by interpreting the spatial and chronological complexity of cultural landscapes.
The RUSLE equation has recently been employed to predict future soil erosion rate by considering the effect of climate change projections on rainfall. Conversely, this research proposes an innovative method to model the effectiveness of pre-industrial agricultural features in mitigating soil erosion risk in response to the current environmental conditions. This methodology has been tested through a case study in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines (N Italy), an area particularly susceptible to landslide hazard. HLC data were integrated in the RUSLE equation using GIS software to evaluate the impact of historic rural landscape features on contemporary environmental settings. The study offers a new protocol that could be used by policymakers and stakeholders who need to develop strategies which encompass both natural and cultural values for landscape planning and management.
Sources:
Nature Scientific Reports
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31334-z .
Provided by the IKCEST Disaster Risk Reduction Knowledge Service System
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