Climate and land use changes are recognized as the greatest threats to biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. Land planning decisions for the future need to be based on a deeper knowledge about the physical, social, and cultural characteristics of the landscapes and the possible impacts of alternative land use- and management developments.
TERRANOVA aims to train 10 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) working with policy makers and the wider society with a deep appreciation of a wide range of sectors affecting landscapes. Through their research, they support the coproduction of responses to the interdisciplinary challenges of land management where biodiversity, ecosystem services, cultural heritage, and economic qualities are balanced and preserved, taking into consideration ongoing climate, environmental and social change. ESRs work on various topics within the main three research objectives:
- To reconstruct the deep history of Europe’s cultural landscapes and corresponding changes in coupled human-nature interactions.
- To rethink the outcomes of human environmental interactions on the present-day landscape in Europe, in order to inform future policymakers with a long-term environmental and social perspective.
- To design landscape management strategies, i) to provide scientific guidance on threats and opportunities for natural and cultural values of Europe’s landscapes; ii) to define criteria for assisted restoration of ecosystems of former (abandoned) agricultural areas; iii) to generate future scenarios for cultural landscape change, with integrated landscape, cultural heritage and biodiversity models, to inform current planning initiatives, e.g. for the transition to a low-carbon society.
ESR 10, Leen Felix, is completing her PhD at IVM's Environmental Geography group. Her aim is to explore possibilities of different LU and management planning strategies to reconcile nature and agriculture in European landscape development to achieve long-term environmental sustainability. She is researching trade-offs and synergies between ecosystem services in response to agricultural intensity changes and land abandonment, in order to prioritise areas for each transition and optimize landscape developments.
For more information, please visit the project website https://terranovaproject.vu.nl/ or contact Leen Felix.