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Ressenya del llibre: Cortés Vázquez, José A.; Beltran, Oriol (coord.) (2019)Repensar la conservación. Naturaleza, mercado y sociedad civil.Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona.&nbsp

The last decades have witnessed a growing research interest of local ecological knowledge (LEK), with some research focusing on its effective transmission for natural resource management. Here we contribute to this body of research by focusing on an understudied agroecosystem: home gardens in rural areas of developed countries. We characterize home garden knowledge in Vall de Gosol (Catalan Pyrenees) and analyze the modes of transmission of such knowledge to discuss how such mechanisms might affect home garden resilience. We identify a diverse local home garden knowledge, which is mainly transmitted from parents to child. Members of the parental generation other than the parents and individuals of the same generation were only important for the transmission of some specific knowledge. We conclude that home gardens are biocultural refugia in a world of decreasing complex local knowledge systems and that different cultural transmission modes confer diversity and enhance social–ecological resilience ...

The policy and planning framework for land use in Scotland has undergone major changes since political devolution began in 1998. The latest reforms have set numerous objectives related to semi-natural, rural and urban landscapes, with a key role attributed to the expansion of corridors and networks. In this paper, we examine the feasibility of the Scottish forest policy and planning framework to drive “the right trees in the right places”, and support the implementation of a spatially and ecologically coherent and multi-functional network of forest and woodland corridors and patches, using North East Scotland as case study. We provide empirical evidence of the lags related to the coherence and consistency of the existing policy and planning framework. We argue that spatially-explicit policy and planning instruments and a stronger degree of coordination amongst institutions and actors operating across policy levels and spatial–temporal scales are needed. We conclude by proposing some pathways forward. It is deemed that through the adoption of such pathways, forest and woodland networks and corridors will not only be targeted at where their multi-functional capabilities can render higher results, but that this can contribute to achieving key challenges of the Scottish territorial policy framework: the gaps between urban and rural planning, and between land ownership and public rights.

Landscape change is driven by a complex combination of physical, ecological and socio-cultural drivers. Because of their inherent complexity, integrative strategies that combine social and environmental data need to be developed in landscape change research, planning and management. This is particularly true for European mountain areas, where landscapes have undergone major changes through human history, tracing back over thousands of years of continuous human intervention. Within this context the purpose of this paper is twofold: to investigate the processes governing landscape change, and to demonstrate the value of an integrative approach to improve the understanding of such changes. In order to test our approach a Mediterranean mountain area in Northeast Spain was selected. As part of the research process, quantitative data of land cover changes were paired with qualitative social assessment based on local inhabitants' perceptions of changes and identification of driving forces. Findings support that the exploration of local perceptions in addition to the quantitative spatial assessment of land cover dynamics enhances the reliability of processes of interpretation and explanation of landscape change and improves the understanding of hidden dynamics and complex driving forces.

Comparing agricultural management practices across scales and in different cultural settings can reveal shared insights into the capacity to adjust and respond to change and uncertainty. Differences make comparisons in environmental risk perceptions and responses particularly interesting and valuable, with obtained similarities being in many ways more interesting than found differences, which might be readily expected in places with remarkable geographical and demographic differences. People’s perception of climatic risks and hazards appears to be important to understand the context in which adaptation strategies to climate change emerge. Our intention, rather than compare the two case studies at the local scale, one in Mexico and one in Spain, is to identify existing common mechanisms to perceive climate change and to address adaptation among two very different geographical and cultural contexts. The study aims first to explore people’s perceptions of climate change and its outcomes; second to analyse the adaptation measures that they have developed and develop some preliminary ideas about their strategies; and third to consider the capacity of people to cope and adapt endogenously, in terms of the measures that people think that their governments should take to enhance/strengthen them at the local scale.