Cultural landscapes and attributes of “culturalness” in protected areas: An exploratory assessment in Greece

- A distance-based assessment provides the first review of cultural landscape features in Greece's protected areas.
- Cultural landscapes and culturally-modified habitat types are prominent in the Natura 2000 protected area network.
- The notion of protected area “culturalness” is introduced for conservation evaluation purposes.
- Assessing cultural attributes of protected areas can be applied even in data-poor regions.

Cultural landscapes are poorly inventoried and evaluated in protected natural areas. This study presents a novel procedure to assess cultural landscape features and their cultural values in the major protected areas of Greece. After identifying a set of culturally modified land cover types and habitat types the GIS-based survey of the entire Natura 2000 protected area network in Greece (419 sites) shows that roughly 67% of protected area land cover consists of cultural landscape features. This was corroborated by the distribution of culturally modified habitat types which take up approximately 50% of the areal cover in a subset of the nation's Natura 2000 network (241 Special Areas for Conservation). Moreover, a set of 12 cultural attributes involving cultural heritage values, traditional land uses and aesthetic quality indicators were scored to assess these “cultural values” in each site. Gradient maps were produced to express an initial nation-wide site ranking profile. Heatmaps help link instead of solely rank culturally valuable sites that are in proximity to each other, showcasing site clusters of outstanding value. These analyses help define the level of “culturalness” of each site based on human-modified landscape and habitat types and provide a baseline review of cultural values in protected natural areas. This screening-level survey identifies the protected areas that may require special attention for managing cultural elements-of-diversity. Difficulties with data availability and uncertainties are reviewed. This procedure supports a paradigm shift that promotes a more holistic evaluation and management of biodiversity-centered protected areas, where until recently cultural landscapes were rarely appreciated.

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