Abstract
Establishing and expanding protected areas (PAs) has become a key conservation tool in efforts to halt global declines in biodiversity. Given the ubiquity of past and present human influence, PAs inevitably include landscapes and seascapes with varying levels of human modification.
We briefly review the geographical biases in England's terrestrial PA network, noting that landscape-scale PAs (National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) across England disproportionately occupy rugged upland terrain of low agricultural value as a result of the specific history of PA creation, but that this also biases which historic landscapes compose PAs.
We explore these biases using Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC). Analysis of HLC revealed that PAs in our focal region in northern England are defined by land-use changes and landscape reorganisation processes of the 18th and 19th centuries, primarily that of enclosure. The impact this landscape transformation had on biodiversity should now form a priority for further research.
This historic landscape influence on PA designation has resulted in PAs being typically owned by large estates with consequences for their biodiversity, management and wider social impact (e.g. greater wealth inequalities).
The results highlight that historic landscape perspectives are useful to address conservation priorities and practices related to the protection of biodiversity and could be especially helpful in understanding the interaction between biodiversity protection and historic land-uses, ownership, management, access and other social impacts.
We briefly review the geographical biases in England's terrestrial PA network, noting that landscape-scale PAs (National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) across England disproportionately occupy rugged upland terrain of low agricultural value as a result of the specific history of PA creation, but that this also biases which historic landscapes compose PAs.
We explore these biases using Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC). Analysis of HLC revealed that PAs in our focal region in northern England are defined by land-use changes and landscape reorganisation processes of the 18th and 19th centuries, primarily that of enclosure. The impact this landscape transformation had on biodiversity should now form a priority for further research.
This historic landscape influence on PA designation has resulted in PAs being typically owned by large estates with consequences for their biodiversity, management and wider social impact (e.g. greater wealth inequalities).
The results highlight that historic landscape perspectives are useful to address conservation priorities and practices related to the protection of biodiversity and could be especially helpful in understanding the interaction between biodiversity protection and historic land-uses, ownership, management, access and other social impacts.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 198-212 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | People and Nature |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 18 Dec 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 5 Feb 2023 |
Bibliographical note
This work was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Centre—the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity (RC-2018-021). The authors wish to thank LCAB researchers and affiliates for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Thanks also to three anonymous reviewers whose comments improved the paper.Data Availability Statement
In addition to being available as a supplementary file, S1, it has been deposited in the University of York's research data repository Research Data York. This has been given a DOI of https://doi-org/10.15124/e1352043-d9ef-4bc0-95e1-f05262302233 and adheres to FAIR data principles.Keywords
- access
- archaeology
- biodiversity conservationa
- 30 by 30
- historic landscape
- protected areas
Access to Document
- Stratigos_etal_PaN_Areas_of_Outstanding_VOR
© 2022 The Authors. People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/