Land Management and Biodiversity Through Time in Upper Ribblesdale, North Yorkshire, UK: Understanding the Impact of Traditional Management

The role of anthropogenic land use in the maintenance of culturally-derived ecosystems has been central to the development of thinking in the ecosystems approach (CBD 2000; Defra 2007, 2010). It is now widely recognised that in Europe, where there is a long cultural history of land use, the highly valued semi-natural habitats of the upland commons rely on traditional management techniques for their maintenance and survival. Similarly the gradual greening of the Common Agricultural Policy as a post-productivist environmental payment provides added incentive to combine policy for social and ecological systems and to highlight the value of traditional management.