Cultural Landscape Essay

A ethnic pour downscape is a piece of grease that possesses indwelling and pagan resources related to an past purget, person, or class of people. They be usually man-make lexis of kinds with the personality and/or society or culture. These tolerate include grand estates, public gardens and parks, educational institutions, cemeteries, highways, and industrial sites. Cultural trimscapes are in any case military personnelist works of art, texts and narratives of cultures that express regional and ethnic identity.They excessively present relationship to their ecological perspective. Human activities have move out to be a study ca function of shaping most substantially-bred grace paintings on the surface of Earth. Human, animal and mould labor expended in using the land brush off create outstanding ethnic embellishs with high aesthetic, cultural and ecological pry such as the paddy-field rice terraces of southeastward Asia, tho whitethorn as well result in la nd adulteration as is the case in almost regions in the Mediterranean.The statistical distri providedion of landforms such as steep slopes, fertile plains, inundated valleys in a embellish sets the frame for land affair by determining factors such as accessibility, water and nutrient availability, but may over long periods of date alike be swopd through land use. On the separate hand, land use serves distinct socio-economic purposes land may emerge materials and sinew through hunting, agriculture or forestry, it may host infra grammatical construction, or it may be needed to absorb emaciate and emissions (Haberl et al., 2004). popscapes can be seen as the item and diachronicly variable outcome of this interplay amidst socio-economic and biophysical forces. During the evolution of cultural landscapes throughout the world, manhood have developed adaptive land-use techniques and created ad hoc sorts of fields, farmsteads, remnant woodlots and the like that depended on both innate(p) and socio-economic conditions.In European plain landscapes, the long history of land transition has led to regionally distinct even patterns of nonrepresentationalally arranged landscape elements, reflecting the historical and cultural background of the prevailing land-use carcass of a region (Bell, 1999). The spatial distribution of ecotopes, the so-called landscape structure, has therefore oft been regarded as a mosaic of rigid processes i. e. landscape structure assumedly mirrors the processes which had been going on in a landscape.This perception has even become a central double in modern landscape ecology. period numerous ecosystem processes are difficult to take down directly, landscape structure can be derived from mapping as well as from remote-sensing data therefore, landscape structure was often not that used to prize 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 contribute Form On The force Of Land physical exertion Cultural landscapes have, in transmission line to subjective and semi- vivid landscapes, special characteristics.The disturbance government as well as the study material and energy fluxes in these transform landscapes is controlled to a large extent by humans. This is done by the different land-use practices utilize for meadows, arable land or forests. Decisions or so land use are made according to the local agro-ecological characteristics which are nested in a hierarchy of social, economical and technical foul constraints. Cultural landscapes can thus only be downstairsstood by analyzing the interplay amongst biophysical and socioeconomic patterns and processes. landscape Structure And Intensity Of Land UseOdum and Turner (1989) fix that the landscape elements of the Georgia landscape in the early 1930s had a higher(prenominal) fractal dimension than the elements of the same region in the 1980s. During the same period of time the use of fertilizers, pesticides and other agrochemicals ontogenyd dramatically. This illustrates that the growing human impact on the land may result in a landscape with decreasing geometrical complexness. Human activities gift rectangularity and rectilinearity into landscapes, producing regular terms with straight borders (Forman, 1999 Forman and Moore, 1992). confused studies suggest that the rate of landscape change is a function of land-use fervor (Alard and Poudevigne, 1999 Hietala-Koivu, 1999 Mander et al. , 1999 Odum and Turner, 1989), and that the geometric complexness of a landscape in particular decreases with increase land-use bulk attended by a decrease of home ground heterogeneity and an increase of doing units. Applying the thermodynamical laws to landscape structure, Forman and Moore (1992) suggested that the concentrated insert of energy (e. g., by tractor ploughing, coiffe production, wildfire) decreases the e ntropy of patches compared to conterminous areas and produces straight and abrupt boundaries. In other words, energy is mandatory 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 means that the landscape structure, in the sense of Forman and Godron (1986), can be regarded as frozen processes. Landscape Structure And Bio vicissitudeMany surveys show that species fetidness 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 measure of land-use intensity seems to be also a thoroughly predictor of species magnificence (Moser et al. , 2002 Wrbka et al. , 1999a). Accordingly, higher species sple ndor in areas with high LD and richness value can be expected.The use of shape complexity indices as indicators for plant species richness is based on an assumed correlational statistics between geometric landscape complexity and biodiversity (Moser et al. , 2002). Obviously, this correlation is not mechanistic but it is supposed to be due to harmonious effects of land-use intensity on landscape shape complexity and species richness. Moser et al. (2002) gives a reliable literature overview about the driving factors prudent for the decrease of landscape complexity with increasing land-use intensity, which resulted in the following key findings* The bulk 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 inhabit cultivated areas (). * Increasing land-use intensity is come with by a decrease of semi-natural and natura l areas (Alard and Poudevigne, 1999 Mander et al. , 1999), resulting in a decrease of natural curvilinear boundaries.* Intensification in agriculture tends to increase the size of production units (Alard and Poudevigne, 1999 Hietala-Koivu, 1999). In profit 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 all the way the interdependence of biodiversity and landscape heterogeneity, induced by closely interwoven ecological, demographical, socio-economic and cultural factors.For an telling conservation management of biodiversity and landscape eco-diversity, a clear understanding of the ecological and cultural processes and their perturbations is essential. Intermediate disturbance levels lead to a highly complex and diverse cultural landscape which ca n 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 intention for landscape conservation planning. The understanding of landscape processes is crucial 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 termination as well as the reliever of particular proposition 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 garland of cultural landscapes which have their own specific characteristics. Geo-ecological land-units provide one solution.This is of special sizea bleness when the relationship of landscape patterns and underlying processes is under investigation. Works Cited Alard, D. , Poudevigne, I. Factors controlling plant diversity in rural landscapes a running(a) approach. Landscape and urban Planning, 1999 46, 2939 Bell, S. , LandscapePattern, Perception and Process. E. & adenosine monophosphateF. N. Spon, London, 1999 Forman, R. T. T. , & Godron, M. Landscape Ecology. Wiley, New York, 1986. Forman, R. T. T. , & Moore, P. N. speculative foundations for understanding boundaries in landscape mosaics.In Hansen, F. J. , Castri, F. (Eds. ), Landscape Boundaries. Consequences for Biotic Diversity and bionomic Flows. Springer, New York, 1992, pp. 236258. Forman, R. T. T. Horizontal processes, roads, suburbs, societal objectives in landscape ecology. In Klopatek, M. , Gardner, R. H. (Eds. ), Landscape bionomic Analysis Issues and Applications. Springer, New York, 1999, pp. 3553. Haberl, H. , Wackernagel, M. , Krausmann, F. , Erb, K. -H . , Monfreda, C. bionomical footprints and human appropriation of net primary winding 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, Southwest 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. do Ecology , 2000 149, 157168. Mander, U. , Mikk, M. , Ku. lvik, M.. Ecological and low intensity agriculture as contributors to landscape and biologic diversity. Landscape and Urban Planning , 1999 46, 169177.