A cultural landscape is any environment that has been shaped by the ongoing relationship between people and their surroundings. It is the opposite of untouched wilderness: a rice terrace, a hedgerow-lined pasture, an ancient city center, or even an abandoned industrial site can all qualify, because their physical form reflects centuries of human decisions layered onto natural terrain. The concept was formalized nearly a century ago, but the questions it raises about biodiversity, land management, and identity feel more urgent now than ever.
Where the Idea Came From
The geographer Carl Sauer introduced the term in 1925 in his paper “The Morphology of Landscape.” His central argument was that culture is a major force in determining the visible features of the planet within specific areas, and that the natural landscape is a medium upon which culture acts. That sounds obvious today, but at the time most geographers treated landscapes as products of geology and climate alone. Sauer flipped the lens: he was the first to formally argue that humankind and the environment have a mutual impact on each other, and his concept of the cultural landscape became a cornerstone of the field of geography.1Research Starter. Carl Sauer
From that foundation, the idea branched in several directions. Archaeologists began reading landscapes for evidence of past societies. Ecologists realized that many environments they had assumed were “natural” were in fact maintained by human activity. And heritage organizations, most prominently UNESCO, started recognizing cultural landscapes as a distinct category worthy of protection. The result is a term that crosses disciplinary borders in ways that can make it slippery, but the core meaning stays remarkably stable: it is the place where nature and culture meet, and neither can be fully understood without the other.
Why Cultural Landscapes Harbor So Much Biodiversity
One of the most counterintuitive findings in ecology over the past few decades is that some of the most species-rich environments on Earth are not pristine wilderness but landscapes that have been actively managed by people for generations. The mechanism is straightforward: traditional agriculture creates a patchwork of different habitat types, and that patchwork supports a far wider range of species than a uniform forest or uniform cropland would.
Japan’s satoyama landscapes are the textbook example. These traditional agricultural mosaics include paddy fields, secondary forests, grasslands, ponds, and streams. The high species richness in satoyama, which includes endangered species, has been sustained by human activities of intermediate intensity, primarily the routines of rice farming and woodland management.2Biological Conservation. Factors maintaining species diversity in satoyama, a traditional agricultural landscape of Japan A decade-long study of bird communities in satoyama found that this heterogeneity supports high avian diversity, with species richness, forest specialist richness, and phylogenetic diversity all increasing over the study period.3Oikos. Avian diversity changes in traditional agricultural landscapes of Japan over ten years
Sweden’s semi-natural pastures tell a similar story from a very different climate. Research on historical infield pastures has shown that preserving their biodiversity depends on managing each pasture in a way that resembles the historical land use that shaped it. The majority of Sweden’s remaining high-nature-value pastures sit in areas where grazing was historically determined by traditional fencing systems and the interplay of meadows and arable fields.4Martor. Revue d’Anthropologie du Musée du Paysan Roumain. Can Current Grazing Practices Preserve Biodiversity in Semi-natural Pastures? A Study of the Historical Ecology of Swedish Infield Pastures Strip away the old grazing patterns, and you lose the grassland species that evolved alongside them.
The pattern repeats globally. Mediterranean maquis, Andean terraces, West African agroforestry systems: wherever traditional management persists, a distinctive and often irreplaceable community of plants and animals tends to persist with it. The lesson is that “natural” and “human-managed” are not always opposites. Many ecosystems that conservationists want to protect are, in a real sense, cultural artifacts.
Indigenous Fire and Water Management
Perhaps nowhere is the entanglement of culture and ecology more vivid than in the fire regimes of Australia. Indigenous Australians shaped vegetation for tens of thousands of years through deliberate, low-intensity burning, a practice now commonly called cultural burning.5PubMed Central. Plant Responses to a Re-emergence of Cultural Burning in Long-Unburnt, Threatened Temperate Woodlands When European colonization disrupted those practices, the consequences were dramatic. Research comparing pre- and post-colonization vegetation in southeastern Australia found that forests and woodlands contained fewer shrubs and more grass before colonization. The disruption of Indigenous vegetation management, combined with climate change, likely preconditioned fire-prone regions for wildfires of unprecedented extent.6Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Disruption of cultural burning promotes shrub encroachment and unprecedented wildfires
This is not just a historical curiosity. The catastrophic bushfire seasons Australia has experienced in recent years have prompted renewed interest in cultural burning as a land management tool. It works because Indigenous fire practitioners are not merely setting fires; they are reading a landscape’s history and current condition and applying fire with enormous specificity, burning particular patches at particular times of year to encourage certain plants, discourage others, and reduce the fuel loads that feed catastrophic blazes.
Water management in Bali offers a different but equally striking case. The island’s rice terraces, often photographed as scenic wonders, are actually complex engineered ecosystems regulated by networks of water temples. These temples are not simply places of worship; they coordinate the timing of planting and water distribution across entire watersheds. In Balinese rice terraces, water is used to construct a pulsed artificial ecosystem, and the temple networks manipulate the states of that system at ascending levels in regional hierarchies.7American Anthropologist. Balinese “Water Temples” and the Management of Irrigation The subak system, as this governance structure is known, achieves equitable water distribution and coordinated planting cycles that reduce pest risks and water scarcity, a form of environmental governance that has proven remarkably resilient over centuries.8Nature Conservation. Indigenous Environmental Governance and Socio-Ecological Resilience: Examining the Subak System as a Model for Sustainable Rural Development in Bali
Both cases illustrate a point that modern environmentalism has been slow to absorb: the people who lived in a landscape for the longest time often developed management systems that are not just culturally important but ecologically sophisticated. Dismissing those systems as “primitive” or assuming the land was simply “natural” before colonization leads to worse environmental outcomes.
What Happens When Cultural Landscapes Are Abandoned
If traditional management sustains biodiversity, the obvious question is what happens when it stops. Across much of Europe, rural depopulation has provided an answer, and it is not always the rewilding success story you might expect.
Italy’s Cinque Terre coast is a vivid case study. Its famous terraced hillsides were carved and maintained over centuries for grape and olive cultivation. When farmers abandoned terraces, the consequences went beyond aesthetics. A study of how these slopes responded to an intense rainfall event found that recently abandoned terraces (less than about 25 to 30 years) were the most hazardous, showing erosion rates roughly two to three times higher than either long-abandoned terraces or still-cultivated ones.9Land Degradation & Development. Response of Terraced Slopes to a Very Intense Rainfall Event and Relationships with Land Abandonment: A Case Study from Cinque Terre (Italy) Agricultural mismanagement and abandonment intensified the damage from rainfall-induced shallow landslides. The implication is troubling: the first few decades after people stop maintaining terraces may be the most dangerous period, as the drainage and structural systems deteriorate but have not yet been replaced by deep-rooted natural vegetation.
More broadly across the Mediterranean, researchers have pushed back against the idea that simply letting farmland “go wild” is always good for conservation. A study examining re-wilding in Mediterranean cultural ecosystems argued that wilderness-focused re-wilding, if applied uncritically, can have unintended negative consequences: it tends to favor forest species at the expense of open-habitat species, reduce the biodiversity that traditional management maintained, and increase wildfire hazard, especially as climate change accelerates.10PubMed Central. Does re-wilding contribute to biodiversity conservation in Mediterranean cultural landscapes?
This is where the evidence gets genuinely complicated. Rewilding is a legitimate conservation strategy in some contexts, particularly where the goal is restoring ecosystems that predate human influence. But in places where centuries of human management have created the biodiversity we want to protect, stepping back can be as damaging as stepping in too aggressively. Conservation policy in these regions increasingly needs to support continued cultural management rather than assuming nature will simply bounce back.
Cultural Landscapes in Cities and Post-Industrial Sites
The term “cultural landscape” tends to conjure images of rural scenery: terraces, pastures, hedgerows. But some of the most interesting applications of the concept are urban. Cities are, after all, the most intensely human-shaped landscapes on Earth, and the question of how to balance historic character with contemporary development is a cultural landscape question at its core.
The Historic Urban Landscape approach, endorsed by UNESCO, provides a framework for understanding how historic fabric and contemporary development can interact without one erasing the other. Florence has served as a test case for this approach, demonstrating how it can be integrated into existing local planning frameworks to manage change in a city whose physical form is itself a heritage asset.11Research for Development. Cultural Heritage and Urban Development: Embracing the Historic Urban Landscape Approach The walled city of Pingyao in China presents a different challenge: integrating this kind of historically sensitive planning into China’s established planning system at both national and local levels.12Cities. City profile Pingyao: The historic urban landscape and planning for heritage-led urban changes
Even more surprising are post-industrial sites, places where mines, railways, and factories have closed and nature has partly reclaimed the ground. A participatory ecological study at the Upton site in England, a former industrial area, found habitats of unexpectedly high conservation value: lowland limestone grassland, localized meadow, and even plant communities typically associated with maritime cliffs and calcareous dunes. Three of five high-value habitat areas were associated with specific community interventions or activities that followed the industry’s decline.13PLoS ONE. Exploring the Links between Post-Industrial Landscape History and Ecology through Participatory Methods These are not “natural” areas and they are not conventionally “cultural” ones either. They sit in a gray zone that the cultural landscape framework is well suited to explain: human activity created the conditions, nature responded, and the result has conservation value precisely because of, not despite, the layered human history.
How Researchers Map and Measure Cultural Landscapes
Studying cultural landscapes requires tools that can capture both physical features and the less tangible values people attach to places. Two technologies have been particularly transformative in the past two decades: LiDAR and participatory mapping.
LiDAR, which uses pulses of laser light fired from aircraft, can penetrate forest canopy and reveal ground-level features that are invisible on satellite imagery and aerial photographs. In southern New England, researchers used airborne LiDAR to rediscover a “lost” archaeological landscape: stone wall networks, building foundations, old roads, and pathways from earlier centuries of settlement that had been completely hidden by forest regrowth.14Journal of Archaeological Science. Rediscovering the lost archaeological landscape of southern New England using airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) This kind of work reveals how much cultural landscape evidence lies beneath the surface of places we might casually read as “natural.”
On the human-values side, public participation GIS, which lets community members mark locations on a map and describe what those places mean to them, has matured into a widely used tool. A comprehensive review of two decades of participatory mapping research found that the values people attach to places are best understood as relationship values, that they reflect how emotionally close participants feel to an area, and that they correlate with attitudes toward land use. Intriguingly, mapped place values also prove to be predictive of land use conflict, though the review also found little evidence that these values actually influence land use decisions in practice.15Applied Geography. Mapping place values: 10 lessons from two decades of public participation GIS empirical research That last finding is a sober reminder: knowing what people value in a landscape does not automatically translate into protecting it.
Participatory mapping is especially useful for assessing cultural ecosystem services, the non-material benefits people derive from landscapes, such as heritage, recreation, spiritual meaning, and sense of identity. These services have traditionally been inferred indirectly from tourism statistics or scenic beauty ratings, but mapping lets people articulate them spatially and in their own terms.16Ecosystem Services. Empirical PPGIS/PGIS mapping of ecosystem services: A review and evaluation
The Ecosystem Services a Cultural Landscape Provides
Ecologists increasingly talk about “ecosystem services,” the tangible and intangible benefits people get from their environments. Cultural landscapes provide an unusually wide bundle of these. They regulate water flow (terraces prevent runoff and erosion), support pollinators (hedgerows and diverse crop rotations feed bees), and sequester carbon in soils built up over generations of management. Those are the material services. But the cultural services, including heritage, aesthetic value, sense of identity, and recreation, are often what make people care enough to keep managing a landscape in the first place.
Researchers have argued that methods from cultural heritage conservation, which are good at analyzing historical values and the drivers of landscape change over time, should be integrated into ecosystem service assessments. Heritage analysis adds a time dimension that purely spatial ecological mapping often misses.17Ecosystem Services. Cultural ecosystem services provided by landscapes: Assessment of heritage values and identity In mountain regions, aesthetic value has even been modeled using GIS tools that combine landscape pattern analysis with survey data on how people perceive different alpine scenes, producing maps of scenic value that planners can use alongside maps of soil quality or water yield.18Ecological Indicators. Cultural ecosystem services of mountain regions: Modelling the aesthetic value
This bundling of services has a practical consequence. When a traditional landscape is abandoned or converted to industrial monoculture, you do not lose just one thing; you lose a whole package at once: the biodiversity, the erosion control, the scenic value, the community identity tied to the place. This makes the economic case for maintenance more compelling than it might first appear, because the benefits are stacked.
Paying Farmers to Keep Cultural Landscapes Alive
One of the persistent problems in cultural landscape conservation is that the people who maintain these landscapes, typically smallholder farmers, bear most of the cost while the benefits flow to society at large. That is a classic market failure. But some creative approaches are beginning to close the gap.
In Italy, a certification scheme for extra-virgin olive oil produced in traditional agricultural landscapes has shown that consumers will pay a premium for products carrying the certification. Research found that the traditional agricultural landscape label commanded a higher price both on its own and in combination with other quality labels, though the combined premium was less than the sum of the individual premiums. The key finding was that traditional agricultural landscapes are not necessarily bound to market failure; the costs farmers face to maintain them can be rewarded through the market.19Ecological Economics. Agricultural landscape certification as a market-driven tool to reward the provisioning of cultural ecosystem services
Other approaches include agri-environment payment schemes, which are common in the European Union, and heritage tourism revenue that flows back to farming communities. None of these mechanisms is sufficient on its own, but together they represent a growing toolkit for making cultural landscape stewardship economically viable. The alternative, waiting for landscapes to collapse and then paying for restoration, is almost always more expensive.
Mental Health and the Therapeutic Landscape
A newer line of research connects cultural landscapes to mental health outcomes. A systematic review of the relationship between urban and cultural landscape heritage and mental health found evidence that cultural landscapes can promote both physical and mental well-being while enhancing a sense of cultural belonging among local populations.20PubMed Central. Impact of urban and cultural landscape heritage on mental health: a systematic review and meta-synthesis
Research on rural tourism destinations has extended the concept of the “therapeutic landscape” beyond hospitals and spas to working agricultural areas. Visitors to community-based rural destinations reported that the natural, social, cultural, and agricultural resources of these areas contributed to their sense of place and therapeutic experiences. Local culture and residents’ lifestyles, not only natural scenery, were important sources of well-being for visitors.21Edward Elgar Publishing. Placing sustainable well-being: An integrative approach to therapeutic landscapes and sustainability in community-based rural destinations from the perspective of visitors The finding aligns with a broader shift in public health thinking: the environments in which people live and visit are not just backdrops to health but active influences on it, and environments shaped by generations of purposeful human activity seem to carry a particular charge.
This research is still young, and the causal pathways are not fully mapped. But it adds another dimension to the value of cultural landscapes and suggests that the loss of a traditional landscape does not just diminish biodiversity or scenic beauty; it may also remove a source of psychological grounding for the communities that live within or visit it.