► Grassland with tradition: surveying traditionally managed ecosystems in the Carpathians

Rural topic(s): Local ecological knowledge

Type: Narrative story

Date of writing: May 26, 2022

Summary:

“This Video Summary, prepared by Monika Janišová, Anamaria Iuga, Cosmin Marius Ivascu and Martin Magnes, refers to the article by Janišová et al. “Grassland with tradition: sampling across several scientific disciplines”, published in Vegetation Classification and Survey (doi.org/10.3897/VCS/2021/60739). It was also summarized in the blog post on vegsciblog.org (vegsciblog.org/2021/03/18/grassland-with-tradition/).

The research led by Monika Janišová and al. was motivated by their interest “to identify traditional farming approaches that result in both high biodiversity and sustainable grassland utilization in a particular region, and confirm their impact also using statistical tests“.

Both video and article explain how the study was conducted in 7 sites and different countries of Eastern Europe, mixing disciplines (biology, anthropology, history) and methods (vegetation sampling on the plot, interviews with members of the community) to understand how the evolution of practices and parcel management had an impact of the flora biodiversity.

One of the highlights is that “Traditional farming can maintain high levels of biodiversity and the Carpathian bio-cultural heritage is a well of wisdom for modern biodiversity conservation.“

Text:

Informations:

Scale of intervention : Regional

Keywords: biodiversity conservation, improvement of biodiversity, ecosystem friendly methods, mountain, traditional knowledge

Places: Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary

Actors: researcher/academic, rural population, farmer

Methods: research