Welcome to Our Social-Ecological Research Blog —Featuring News on Rural Landscapes, Ecosystem Services and Sustainable Land Use
People • Nature • Landscapes reports stories and research updates from the Social-Ecological Interactions Group, based at the Universities of Göttingen and Kassel. Looking back at a month of diverse, exciting stories — from research on German private forests to lessons learnt in remote fieldwork in times of COVID-19 — we think it is time to introduce ourselves, and to take stock.
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For many researchers, science communication remains a challenging issue.
Communicating scientific findings to the public always seems overly urgent —and especially so when it comes to sustainability sciences — , but seemingly never gets a satisfying amount of attention in academia. With this blog and under the designation People • Nature • Landscapes, we seek to address this issue, regularly bringing news from our international social-ecological research to the public.
We are 15 researchers from different regions of the world, working together in the group Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems, headed by Prof. Tobias Plieninger. Our research contributes to the growing, but still remarkably unknown field of human-nature interactions in sustainability sciences.
On the basis of our diverse disciplinary backgrounds — such as environmental sciences, sociology, geography, biology, botanics, landscape management, ecology or planning — we conduct inter- and transdisciplinary research at the intersection of the social and natural sciences.
Exploring agricultural landscapes as social-ecological systems, we address current environmental issues of global relevance by means of landscape-level case studies around the world — with the overarching goal of promoting sustainability in agriculture and other forms of land use.
Our aim is to develop an in-depth understanding of how landscape changes, biodiversity and ecosystem services interrelate in different contexts.
The stories on hand are as diverse as our members’ background and research projects, and as the landscapes examined. Now that a month has passed since the launch of this blog, many of us have dived into the blogging spirit, struggling to
illustrate their experiences and findings in plain language while still accounting for the complexity of their research.
Maria Garcia-Martin reports on the values of landscape products in the Mediterranean,
directing attention to the unique connections of such products to their landscapes of origin. Especially when compared to the mass products of industrialized agriculture, landscape products support traditional farming practices and high biodiversity rates— but their production is rarely profitable. How can the values of landscapes products be promoted? How can their producers’ socio-economic situation be improved?
Legitimate and locally accepted conservation strategies for Protected Areas form the topic of Miguel A. Cebrián’s story,
which focuses on the locally grounded, non-scientific knowledge, beliefs and practices people hold about local ecosystems and their management in Sierra de Guadarrama, Spain. In how far do these interact with scientific ecological knowledge? Which visions for protected areas do local people hold?
Malin Tiebel informs about her research on private forest owners in Germany,
who represent the largest owner group of these highly valued forest landscapes. How do private forest owners relate to nature conservation and resource use? What challenges to they face, and which management practices do they decide for?
The COVID-19 pandemic strongly affects the ways in which fieldwork can be performed. Cristina Quintas Soriano reports on her lessons learnt
in the context of a study on the effects of land abandonment on local communities in Extremadura, Spain. How can remote fieldwork deliver reliable results under present-day conditions?
These and many more insights into the interactions of people, nature and landscapes can already be found online on our blog. In the beginning of next week, Emmeline Topp will share with us the experiences she gained in her social-ecological research in the South-African ‘Swartland’.
Enjoy reading! Follow us online, and please share this email with anyone who could be interested.
With best regards,
the Social-Ecological Interactions Group
