The holm oak and cork oak parklands of the Iberian Peninsula – termed dehesa in Spanish and montado
in Portuguese – are iconic of Mediterranean wood pastures as a whole. They have
attracted attention of scientists and the public as one of the most extensive
and best-preserved low-intensity farming systems in Europe .
The integration of traditional land use and biodiversity conservation in dehesas has been frequently declared an
example for the sustainable management of the countryside as a whole.
I am one
of many (mainly Northern) European environmentalists who discovered the dehesa
landscapes in the 1990s and came back many times as researcher, tourist, and
friend. My research covers the ecology, history, and management of the dehesa
as a land-use system. I am particularly interested in the extent and the land-use
related drivers of oak regeneration failure. It is a common problem in many
wood pastures of the world that tree stands are mostly aged, while seedlings or
saplings are almost nonexistent. My research generated two insights – one that is
a bit hard to accept for enthusiasts of “traditional” land use and one that may
show a path to the future of wood pastures. First, I didn’t find any evidence
that active regeneration of oaks has ever been part of traditional management
in the dehesa. “A dehesa is not constructed to last perpetually”, is my main conclusion.
Although traditional “high-nature value” land use has an important role to play,
I argue that we should accept that traditional ecological knowledge and
management do not offer solutions for all current conservation problems.
Second, my research into land-use history showed that most dehesa wood pastures
are much more recent than commonly thought (although the origins of the dehesa
system reach back far in history). The golden age of dehesa creation was the
late 18th and the 19th century. Actually, evaluation of
aerial photographs highlights that some dehesas had been created out of
shrublands as late as in the 1950s. The positive message for wood pasture
conservation emerging out of this is: we do not have to wait for hundreds or
thousands of years until a wood pasture develops ecological and cultural
values. It is certainly crucial to preserve the remaining ancient wood pastures
of Europe ; but we should complement wood
pasture preservation through a strategy of developing new wood pastures.
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| Ancient holm oak trees in extremadura (Photo: Tobias Plieninger) |
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| A more recent cork-oak dehesa (Photo: Gerardo Moreno) |
Tobias
Plieninger
Ecosystem Services Research
Group, Berlin-Brandenburg
Academy Berlin ,
Germany
E-mail
address: plieninger@bbaw.de
1 comment:
I take part as European environmentalists who discovered the dehesa landscapes in the 1980s and came back many times as researcher, tourist, and friend.
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