
This website provides a viewing interface for the data collected for the Case study landscape of the Dutch river delta in the context of the EU funded HERCULES research programme (http://www.hercules-landscapes.eu/). The overarching goal of this transdisciplinary research project is to increase understanding of drivers, patterns, and values of European cultural landscapes and to use this knowledge to develop, test, and demonstrate strategies for their protection, management, and planning.
The project builds on the development and application of innovative technologies and tools for assessing cultural landscapes. The strong involvement of small and medium-sized enterprises and non-governmental organisations provides a prototype for the empowerment of these institutions in landscape planning and management. The project cooperates closely with public and private authorities, agencies, and associations of citizens at local, national, and EU levels. Five objectives address the key topics of the call and form the structure of the project.
Objective 1: To synthesise existing knowledge on drivers, patterns, and outcomes of persistence and change in Europe’s cultural landscapes
Objective 2: To perform targeted case studies to develop in-depth insights on dynamics and values of cultural landscapes
Objective 3: To develop a typology of cultural landscapes and scale-up case study insights using observations and landscape modelling
Objective 4: To develop visions for re-coupling social and ecological components in cultural landscapes and translate them into policy and management options
Objective 5: To design and implement a community-based Knowledge Hub for Good Landscape Practice and test it with land users, agencies, small and medium-sized enterprises, and citizen associations
The data presented in this webviewer are part of the Spatial Data Infrastructure developed for HERCULES´s Work Package 2. The principal aim of WP 2 is to enhance methodologies to collect data and to create knowledge about the long-term dimension of cultural landscape change. Its specific objectives are:
- to define an innovative methodological procedure for understanding the long-term development and transformation of cultural landscapes, drawing on recent insights from landscape archaeology, geography and (historical) ecology;
- to develop and test an infrastructural facility (Spatial Data Infrastructure; SDI) for retrieving and linking archaeological, historical and ecological data and geo-information to support the interdisciplinary study of landscape change
- to develop and test models for analyzing long-term trends in landscape history in the case study sites
- to share research outcomes with relevant stakeholders through the knowledge hub developed
Within HERCULES WP2 the concrete possibilities of dynamic modeling will be explored by adopting a case study approach. This will be done for three different areas, each being representative for more widespread environmental and climatic conditions within Europe: Atlantic (the Dutch river area), Boreal (the Uppland area, Sweden) and continental European conditions (Kodavere and Vooremaa, Estonia). A Mediterranean area (Puglia, Italy) will be used for comparison. All case studies, most notably the Dutch and Swedish ones, will start from the premises defined in Section 4 and follow the operational principles of Section 5. For each of the three main study regions a somewhat different modelling framework will be adopted to achieve this aim. Therefore, we will briefly introduce each of the case study landscapes below.