Land management and biodiversity through time in upper Ribblesdale, North Yorkshire, UK : understanding the impact of traditional management

Shaw, Helen and Whyte, Ian (2013) Land management and biodiversity through time in upper Ribblesdale, North Yorkshire, UK : understanding the impact of traditional management. In: Cultural severance and the environment : the ending of traditional and customary practice on commons and landscapes managed in common. Environmental History . Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 311-321. ISBN 978-94-007-6158-2

Abstract

The role of anthropogenic land use in the maintenance of culturally-derived ecosystems has been central to the development of thinking in the ecosystems approach (CBD 2000; Defra 2007, 2010). It is now widely recognised that in Europe, where there is a long cultural history of land use, the highly valued semi-natural habitats of the upland commons rely on traditional management techniques for their maintenance and survival. Similarly the gradual greening of the Common Agricultural Policy as a post-productivist environmental payment provides added incentive to combine policy for social and ecological systems and to highlight the value of traditional management.