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During the last four decades, sediment cores were collected from the deepest zones of >30 small lakes in south-west Germany to investigate archaeological questions about settlement and land use history in Central Europe. The primary aim was to establish well-dated pollen profiles with very high temporal resolution. A major focus was to reconstruct the extent and intensity of land clearing during the Neolithic, the Iron Age, the Roman Period as well as through the Medieval timeframe in context with intermittent recovery periods during political and economic crises. In southwestern Germany, lake sites are not evenly distributed, but rather restricted to the formerly glaciated landscapes of the Northern Alpine foreland, including Lake Constance and the Black Forest. The most important results are as follows: 1. Central basinal sediments of small lakes are the best archives to study environmental change, past human impact, and vegetation. 2. The lakes reflect the environment and its change, triggered by natural and anthropogenic factors. 3. Lakes in areas with silicic bedrock have much lower sedimentation rates than lakes in the carbonate-rich North Alpine foreland in Germany. 4. Human impact causes sedimentation rates to increase by different rates, depending on the magnitude of impact and system sensitivity; in most cases, lamination disappears from the sedimentary record. 5. The small lakes integrate local landscape history, whereas the larger lakes integrate over larger catchments and record regional signals. 6. During the Late Weichselian and early Holocene, the landscape history of Southwestern Germany was rather uniform on a regional scale. 7. Landscape history from the middle Holocene onwards was more and more impacted by man, resulting in a variety of local and regional effects that are recorded in these lakes. 8. Overall, climate and natural factors determined the environmental settings, and people preferred regions with fertile soils and warm climate for settling and farming.

Urban environments around the world are the result of their evolutionary and geographic history, and more contemporary influences of the social, cultural, economic, political and technical systems that shaped their construction. In this chapter, we use urban filters as the overarching framework within which specific aspects pertaining to the history of the landscape will be discussed. Legacy effects are discussed under the subthemes of urban form and development history, biodiversity, biological invasions, soils, urban freshwater bodies, natural disasters, the effects of war on urban environments and extinction debts. Lastly, the collective effects of changing urban environments over time manifests in citizens through desensitisation, termed generational amnesia or the extinction of experience, which has important consequences for residents’ perceptions towards urban biodiversity. In trying to disseminate patterns and processes in urban areas of the Global South, this overview revealed that more urban ecology research is required to begin untangling the effects of urbanisation and bioclimatic regions from the drivers that are much more context-specific. Growing the number of studies conducted in the Global South is critical to ensure that there is an evidence base that is representative of the full range of conditions for cities around the world.

In this chapter, I expand and clarify my definition of a landscape as this definition has large consequences for understanding and improving the management of landscape for change. The first step in defining a landscape is defining the primary units of consideration: What and who are we including? Do we include all the individuals? Do we include every institution and every culture? What biotic and abiotic components must be included? What role should landscape history play? For role for technology? Only after we define what is included can we consider the size of a landscape and the period of time to consider when managing for landscape change.

A mantle of both active and stable aeolian sand covers approximately 34,000 km2 of northern Arizona, western New Mexico and southern Utah on the southern Colorado Plateau. From west to east, these deposits can be subdivided into the Kaibab-Moenkopi dunes, Chinle Valley dunes, and Chaco dunes, all of which include relict, partly stable and mobile aeolian sand. Locally, these deposits have distinct compositional characteristics. An examination of previous studies into disparate aspects of Colorado Plateau dunes, taken in the context of local geology, Quaternary landscape history and geomorphic processes, provides new insights into interpretation of this regional aeolian sedimentary record. Additional new data about the characteristics of the deposits, and an assessment of present-day climatic conditions enhances our ability to interpret the relative influences of ecosystem and geomorphologic processes with climate variability that continue to influence both new dune formation and reactivation of older deposits. Taken as a whole, the data emphasizes the role that local landscape conditions and history play in providing the context for correctly interpreting aeolian activity and depositional environments, and whether sediment supply or climate play a dominant role in sand dune formation. This is particularly true in the Little Colorado River Valley of northeastern Arizona, where Quaternary volcanic activity has significantly influenced the local landscape processes, deposit characteristics, and dune paleohistory.

The Holler colonies are settlements in European marsh and dyke landscapes created starting in the High Middle Ages through land reclamation by Dutch water engineers who had been hired by local leaders. Some Holler colonies were later abandoned; others remained. Surviving colonies, some of which remain and are largely intact, was often changed by later land reclamation processes (Renes and Piastra 2011: 24). Today, the remainders of these landscapes are visible proof of the intangible and tangible heritage of European economic and social history. These created landscapes—Holler landscapes—are easily recognized by their linear landscape structure and small parceling. Other characteristic features are hydraulic engineering structures, such as dykes, drainage systems, receiving waters, and the pumping stations used to clear the marshes of water and strip parceling, linear settlements, and infrastructure, houses and farms in a row, dykes, roads and byways, ditches, and channels. Holler colonies are a European landscape typology in several respects. First, they were the consequence of Dutch water engineers’ large-scale knowledge transfer within Europe, are always built at the invitation of local leaders, and always encompass the diffusion of Dutch laws, traditions, production, and models of society. Second, they may be considered a European landscape type that defined European wetland areas along large rivers from the Middle Ages onwards. Their uniqueness is based on the techniques applied, the social processes involved, and their long duration.

The Mývatn area in northeast Iceland has been occupied by farming communities since the arrival of Viking Age settlers in the late ninth century. Despite its inland location and relatively high elevation, this lake basin was affected by continuous human occupation through periods of harsh climate, volcanic eruptions, epidemics, and world system impacts. Mývatn’s residents have practised farming, fishing, egg-collecting, and hunting activities for over a millennium. They managed the landscape and its resources with the use of traditional knowledge, which included the story of the troll woman, Kraka, who lived in a cave in the mountain Blafjall (“Blue Mountain”). The story of Kraka and the river Kraka that bears her name provides a striking metaphor for the landscape history including water resources and environmental changes the agricultural community sustained over time.

The role which soil plays as an indicator of landscape stability is discussed. The influential model and concepts developed by Butler (1959) are used as the framework through which soils of the past can be studied. Although only a relatively few Quaternary depositional sequences are observable on the Maltese Islands almost without exception, they all contain palaeosoil material. The specific sites discussed (Marfa ridge, Santa Maria Bay (Comino), St. Thomas Bay, Għar Lapsi and Ċirkewwa) reveal how palaeosoils can be used to provide insights into differing aspects of landscape history. In addition, buried materials can also provide information about the nature of soil.

Landscape bears the layering of settlement’s thousand years long history. Canals around the city of Parma show patterns that express the survey tools and the relationship between the city and the territory. There are not many documents about the works carried out by the Romans, as well during the Middle Age. The landscape itself testifies its far past in architecture and in the design of water management, which witnesses a carefully controlled execution of hydraulic works. Different patterns represent three historical phases, according with the survey’s concept and water management design. Canals show the reason behind patterns that identify the main phases of landscape transformation. Landscape geometry tells the history of settlement in the concept of human transformations. The layering of historical maps and landscape built signs is the basic instruments of territory knowledge and transformation. A sustainable landscape management follows the development of the environmental legacy.

This chapter provides a description of Yakushima Island, off the coast of Kyushu in southwestern Japan, which was designated as a World Heritage Site (Natural) in December 1993. Yakushima has an image of “pristine nature,” and the island contains several rare and relatively undisturbed geological, geomorphological, and ecological features. This perception attracts many tourists to the island, but conservation areas of Japan also contain a wealth of cultural and historical materials such as communal forestry and sacred landscapes, in addition to their natural landscapes. This chapter presents an overview of the human association on the forests in modern times and provides an account of some challenges that world heritage designation can pose for the management of heritage. The chapter also focuses on how cultural and historical remains and the customs of local communities constitute an important addition to the recognized natural heritage values.

This chapter establishes the conceptual evolution of cultural heritage as a proper object for historical scholarship through the analysis of the development of the notion of urban heritage in international standard-setting instruments. It starts with the current notion of HUL, which was developed to define and manage the special features of contemporary urban heritage characterized by an increasing number of heritage sites and by the extension of the notion of cultural heritage to include intangible heritage, diversity, and sustainability. Three essential components of HUL (security/time, territory, and community) are selected to tell the conceptual history of urban heritage preservation from the first documents up to the 2010s and to reveal the current concept of urban heritage and heritage cities in the international discourse.

Today, the Mediterranean is characterized by landscape patterns whose compositions result from countless, long and complex cultural and historical processes. However, the pressure on these landscapes and their rapid transformation into more modern forms call out for a better knowledge of the more complex forms of traditional land use and relative landscapes. In this context, an identification and clarification of the role of such mixed and complex forms of agro-forestry systems and landscapes, named “giardino Mediterraneo” (“Mediterranean garden”) is necessary. This term is often applied to and associated with numerous different agricultural and agro-forestry systems as well as to numerous different kinds of rural landscapes, due to the complex and intricate historical process that has led to their identification and cultural evolution over time. This study identifies the characteristics of the polycultural and polyspecific Mediterranean garden’s landscape, characterized by the presence of trees (both wild and cultivated), starting from a historical overview of Sicily. The analysed Halaesa landscape (Sicily) case study, as one of the first historical detailed description of a complex Mediterranean cultural landscape, is the result of a polycultural agro-silvo-pastoral system which guarantees complexity and richness (in terms of structural and biological diversity), as well as with reference to others environmental, cultural and economic multifunctionality. However, a comparison with the typological systems currently used for the cataloguing and mapping of traditional Mediterranean landscapes at different scales shows the transversal importance of polycultural Mediterranean garden landscapes, and demonstrates how much a better definition and characterization of them is needed.

In geodesign practice, there is often little regard for the history and heritage of the places subject to design and planning. This is an unnecessary and costly omission. The history of regions and landscapes provides a long-term perspective that informs us of important long-standing processes, whereas heritage practices inform us about central social values to be considered when geodesigning. Incorporating these lead to more thoughtful and suited designs and interventions. Their general omission from geodesign practice is not due to theoretical constraints—the models in Steinitz’s framework indeed lend themselves to the incorporating of historical perspectives. The main problem appears to be designers and planners’ unfamiliarity with historical and heritage concepts and their preference for insights based on quantitative analysis. The chapter introduces the concepts of landscape history and heritage values and explains how these may fruitfully incorporated in geodesign theory and practice with the help of a Spatial Data Infrastructure, using the Dutch river delta as an exemplary case.