Mapping Cultural-Historic Landscapes of Europe

Friday May 7, 2010,
Wageningen UR, The Netherlands
Location: GAIA building,
Droevendaalsesteeg 3 (Building 101),
Room Gaia 1

The European Landscape Convention (Florence, 2000) aims to promote European landscape protection, management and planning, through the adoption of national measures and the establishment of European co-operation between the European member states. For policy makers and planners, landscape assessments give insight in the strength and weaknesses of the landscape. The threshold for landscape quality, the vulnerability, and the resilience of the landscape area are issues to cope with. Describing the cultural-historic state of the landscape is essential. Changing character and identity of the landscape is a process taking place between the physical landscape and the perception of people who are involved. The physical landscape is the objective factor; the perception of people is the subjective factor. Mapping the cultural-historic factor of a landscape as the result of human-landscape interaction, combining objective and subjective elements, is challenging. The goal of the convention should be strongly supported by geo-data of interest that describes the cultural-historic landscapes of Europe. Recently the INSPIRE directive proposed the Definition of Annex themes and scope (version 3 – 2008). We may expect that this definition includes the data that supports our interest in cultural-historic landscapes and regional identities.
Knowing the geo-data sets as described by the INSPIRE Definition we do really wonder if these data do support the Landscape convention goals. During this seminar four renown researchers will give their opinion based on their own research upon the definition of cultural-historic landscape, operating that definition by geo-data, the nature of such data, and what steps to make to include such data in the INSPIRE Annexes. We foresee a set of vivid presentations that will put cultural-historic landscape of Europe on the map.
The seminar precedes the PhD thesis defense of Gerd Weitkamp. You are also invited to attend the public defense of his thesis.