Exploring the role of plant-animal interactions in the long-term development of heritage landscapes in Europe

Abstract

Spanning from southern Europe to central and eastern Europe, open woodlands, such as forest-steppe and garrigue, and the grasslands within, constitute protected heritage landscapes considered hotspots for biodiversity, faced with threats from climate change and the disappearance of traditional farming and herding practices. Through a review of published case studies, we explore the biographies of the Eurasian agro-pastoral landscapes in eastern Europe, southern France, the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian and German Alpine forelands. Alongside depicting the natural features that raise our interest in these environments today, we search for anthropogenic agencies in the formation and maintenance of agro-sylvo-pastoral land use in these interconnected aspects: forest openness, biodiversity and animal husbandry. We focus especially on the impact on vegetation of domesticated animals since prehistoric times. Based on different kinds of complementary proxies from palaeoecology as well as bioarchaeology and geoarchaeology, we demonstrate that these environments are the result of a longue durée process at the interplay between natural and anthropogenic dynamics. This review highlights the importance of further understanding landscape dynamics through the lens of long-term developments of environments and of herding/farming practices, to help inform tangible cultural heritage and conservation programes for the protection of European landscape diversity. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Unravelling domestication: multi-disciplinary perspectives on human and non-human relationships in the past, present and future’.