Research, part of a Special Feature on Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Global Environmental Change Biocultural Refugia: Combating the Erosion of Diversity in Landscapes of Food Production
By Stephan Barthel, Carole L. Crumley, U. Svedin. 2013
116 citations recorded by the source corpus.
There is urgent need to both reduce the rate of biodiversity loss caused by industrialized agriculture and feed more people. The aim of this paper is to highlight the role of places that harbor traditional ecological knowledge, artifacts, and methods when preserving biodiversity and ecosystem services in landscapes of food production. We use three examples in Europe of biocultural refugia, defined as the physical places that not only shelter farm biodiversity, but also carry knowledge and experiences about practical management of how to produce food while stewarding biodiversity and ecosystem services. Memory carriers include genotypes, landscape features, oral, and artistic traditions and self-organized systems of rules, and as such reflect a diverse portfolio of practices on how to deal with unpredictable change. We find that the rich biodiversity of many regionally distinct cultural landscapes has been maintained through different smallholder practices developed in relation to local environmental fluctuations and carried within biocultural refugia for as long as millennia. Places that transmit traditional ecological knowledge and practices hold important lessons for policy makers since they may provide genetic and cultural reservoirs — refugia — for the wide array of species that have co-evolved with humans in Europe for more than 6000 thousand yrs. Biodiversity restoration projects in domesticated landscapes can employ the biophysical elements and cultural practices embedded in biocultural refugia to create locally adapted small-scale mosaics of habitats that allow species to flourish and adapt to change. We conclude that such insights must be included in discussions of land-sparing vs. land-sharing when producing more food while combating loss of biodiversity. We found the latter strategy rational in domesticated landscapes with a long history of agriculture.
Subfields: Ecology, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bd4b62000b99ffe0ffb3776a353c81999c31514
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Citations in the corpus
- Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land: Leverage places to mitigate impacts on SDG2 and on the Earth System (2019, background): “Therefore, achieving SDG2 is impossible without the sustainable management of existing agricultural land and associated soil ecosystem services (Barthel et al., 2013; Foley et al., 2005; Gordon et al., 2017).”
- Rewiring food systems to enhance human health and biosphere stewardship (2017, background): “In some places, culture and language still remain tightly intertwined with the ecology of the landscape, creating and maintaining ‘biocultural refugia’ [74].”