Biocultural refugia: combating the erosion of diversity in landscapes of food production
Summary
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 ransmit 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.
