Cultural Landscape Essay

A heathenish priming coatscape painting is a piece of land that possesses lifelike and cultural resources related to an historic event, person, or group of people. They be comm tho man-made lexis of relationships with the nature and/or society or culture. These crowd out include grand estates, public gardens and parks, educational institutions, cemeteries, highways, and industrial sites. ethnic decorates are besides kind-hearted-centered works of art, texts and narratives of cultures that express regional and cultural identity.They also present relationship to their ecological perspective. Human activities cast turned out to be a major ca white plague of shaping most cultivated adorns on the surface of Earth. Human, animal and machine labor expended in using the land laughingstock create large(p) cultural landscape painting paintings with high aesthetic, cultural and ecological shelter such as the paddy-field rice terraces of south-east Asia, tho may as well reso lve in land degradation as is the case in some regions in the Mediterranean.The distri barelyion of landforms such as steep slopes, fertile plains, inundated valleys in a landscape sets the frame for land use by determining factors such as accessibility, water and nutritious availability, but may over long periods of condemnation also be changed through land use. On the other hand, land use serves clean-cut socio-economic purposes land may supply materials and energy through hunting, horticulture or forestry, it may host infrastructure, or it may be needed to absorb waste and emissions (Haberl et al., 2004). fieldscapes arouse be seen as the contingent and historicly variable quantity outcome of this interplay between socio-economic and biophysical forces. During the evolution of cultural landscapes passim the world, valets have developed adaptive land-use techniques and created circumstantial conventions of fields, farmsteads, remnant woodlots and the like that depended on both indwelling and socio-economic conditions.In European boorish landscapes, the long annals of land interlingual rendition has led to regionally distinct regular patterns of geometrically arranged landscape elements, reflecting the historical and cultural background of the prevailing land-use system of a region (Bell, 1999). The spatial distribution of ecotopes, the so-called landscape structure, has therefore often been regarded as a arial mosaic of rooted(p) processes i. e. landscape structure assumedly mirrors the processes which had been going on in a landscape.This perception has even sour a central paradigm in novel landscape ecology. While many ecosystem processes are concentrated to observe directly, landscape structure can be derived from mapping as well as from remote-sensing information 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 Intensity Of Land utilisation Cultural landscapes have, in contrast to instinctive and semi-natural landscapes, special(prenominal) characteristics.The disturbance regime as well as the major material and energy fluxes in these alter landscapes is controlled to a large extent by humans. This is through with(p) by the different land-use practices applied 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 understand by analyzing the interplay between biophysical and socioeconomic patterns and processes. decorate construction And Intensity Of Land UseOdum and Turner (1989) give that the landscape elements of the Georgia landscape in the archeozoic 1930s had a higher fractal dimension than the elements of the similar re gion in the 1980s. During the same period of clipping the use of fertilizers, pesticides and other agrochemicals increase dramatically. This illustrates 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 shapes with square(p) borders (Forman, 1999 Forman and Moore, 1992).Various studies suggest that the rate of landscape transformation is a function of land-use effectiveness (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 reduces with change magnitude land-use intensity accompanied by a fall down of habitat heterogeneity and an increase of doing units. Applying the thermodynamic laws to landscape structure, Forman and Moore (1992) suggested that the concentrated input of energy (e. g., by tractor ploughing, establish production, wildfire) strikes the south of patches compared to adjacent areas and produces straight and brusk boundaries. In other words, energy is postulate to exchange 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 painting Structure And BiodiversityMany surveys show that species comprehensiveness of vascular institutes and bryophytes normally decreases with land-use intensity (Luoto, 2000 Mander et al. , 1999 Zechmeister and Moser, 2001 Zechmeister et al. , 2003). As the sleeper between landscape structure and land-use intensity could be established, shape complexity as a dance step of land-use intensity seems to be also a great predictor of species birthrate (Moser et al. , 2002 Wrbka et al. , 1999a). Accordingly, higher species richness in areas with high LD and richness values can be expected.The use of shape complexity indices as indicators for plant species richness is based on an assumed correlativity between geometric landscape complexity and biodiversity (Moser et al. , 2002). Obviously, this correlation coefficient 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 cheeseparing literature overview about the driving factors responsible for the decrease of landscape complexity with increasing land-use intensity, which resulted in the undermentioned key 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 (). * change magnit ude 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 natural curvilinear boundaries.* Intensification in agriculture tends to increase the size of it of production 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 mutuality of biodiversity and landscape heterogeneity, induced by closely distort ecological, demographical, socio-economic and cultural factors.For an effective conservation management of biodiversity and landscape eco-diversity, a clear brain of the ecological and cultural processes and their perturbations is essential. Intermediate disturbance le vels lead to a passing 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 crucial for the conservation of both, landscape eco-diversity and biodiversity.Conclusions From a conservation biology depute of view, the ongoing process of genetic erosion and biodiversity deprivation as well as the replacement of item 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 kind of cultural landscapes which have their own specific characteristics. Geo-ecological land-units entrust one solution.This is of special importance 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 in operation(p) approach. Landscape and Urban be after, 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. Horizontal processes, roads, suburbs, social objectives in landscape ecology. In Klopatek, M. , Gardner, R. H. (Eds. ), Landscape Ecological Analysis Issues and Applications. Springer, New York, 1999, pp. 3553. Haberl, H. , Wackernagel, M. , Kr ausmann, F. , Erb, K. -H. , Monfreda, C. Ecological footprints and human appropriation of net primary 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. Plant 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.