Transhumant pastoralism has played a central role in shaping and managing Mediterranean mountain landscapes. Together with specialized agricultural and sylvicultural practices it has played a pivotal role in transforming the ecology of environmental systems over time: from plant and animal populations, up to the physical-chemical properties and structural characteristics of the soils. This contribution aims to identify and characterize agro-sylvo-pastoral practices and related environmental effects at Monte Mongioie (SW Alps, Italy), a summer pastureland historically affected by transhumant livestock from the Tyrrhenian coast and the Po valley. High-resolution, multi-proxy research is presented, combining pedoanthracology, palynology, archaeobotany, archaeoentomology, malacology, biomolecular analysis, soil micromorphology, and chemistry with radiocarbon dating and historical ecology observations. This evidence has been cross-checked with documentary and iconographic sources (i.e. historical texts and maps) to unravel the complex historical practices related to the use and management of grazing resources. The integrated analysis revealed a well-preserved Roman to Medieval paleosol with high organic content, rapidly buried by a Late Medieval colluvial event that sealed the underlying features. The analyzed assemblages document persistent open grassland landscapes from the Roman period onward, maintained through sheep/goat grazing, temporary cultivation, and controlled fire use for vegetation management within a commons regime system. Progressive woodland encroachment from the 19th-20th centuries reflects the gradual abandonment of historical agro-sylvo-pastoral practices. This research highlights the high potential of dry off-sites as archeological and environmental archives when analyzed through a multi-proxy approach and a regressive, high-resolution analysis of all the different evidence unearthed.

This brief note presents the first fragments of a reflection on Alberto Magnaghi’s exchanges with historical ecology, in his extraordinary openness to methods and approaches that he saw as having the potential to contribute to the territorialist project for the regeneration of places.

Beekeeping activity is a privileged lens for looking at the impacts of climate change since this human activity is profoundly and intimately embedded in the local ecology with particular reference to the flora. Therefore, we conducted 47 semi-structured interviews to identify the local perceptions of climate change impacts and their drivers among beekeepers of Liguria, a mountainous region of NW Italy. We found that beekeepers especially noticed changes in bee productivity and behaviour and melliferous flora productivity. Moreover, drought is a significant driver of changes in beekeeping as it affects both bees and melliferous plants. However, other drivers, namely alien species, pesticide spread, and abandonment of small-scale agriculture, also concur synergistically. We conclude that landscape planning sensitive to the needs and requests of beekeepers can further contribute to their adaptation to the impacts of climate change and reduce other detrimental phenomena on honeybee wellbeing by supporting small-scale agriculture to maintain a diverse landscape that provides fodder for pollinators.

For centuries, transhumance has been a socio-economic system capable of shaping mountain landscapes and environments. The paper presents two case studies aimed at identifying the historical -ecological traces of seasonal breeding systems to characterize the environmental legacy of transhumance. The proposed approach enables the evaluation of the positive externalities of past pastoral practices in terms of vegetation resources activation (leaf -fodder trees, ancient grasslands) and water resources maintaining (springs, ponds, small lakes, peat -bogs, etc.).

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Background The abandonment of mountain areas in Europe is a process that started during industrialisation and whose traces are still present nowadays. Initiatives aimed at stopping this decline and preserving the local biological and cultural diversities reflect the crucial issue of fostering sustainable rural development. This article contributes to the ongoing debate in assessing and preserving local ecological knowledge (LEK) in a highly marginalised mountain community in the Piedmontese Apennines to support local development. In so doing, it continues a larger project assessing how local botanical knowledge and landscapes evolve over time, in order to understand in more depth which factors affect how LEK is shaped, eroded, and re-created, and how this could be revitalised. Methods We compared information about the current gathering and use of local wild plants in the upper Borbera Valley (Carrega Ligure municipality, NW Italy), elicited via 34 in-depth open and semi-structured interviews, with the findings of a field study conducted in the same location, most likely carried out at the end of the 1970s and published in 1981. Results There were remarkable quantitative and qualitative differences between the two ethnobotanies. The gathering and use of some wild medicinal plants growing in meadows, woodlands, and higher mountain environments ( Achillea , Centaurea , Dianthus , Ostrya , Picea , Polygonum , Potentilla , and Thymus ) seems to have disappeared, whereas the collection of plants growing in more anthropogenic environments, or possibly promoted via contacts with the “reference” city of Genoa (the largest city close to Carrega and historically the economic and cultural centre to which the valley was mostly connected), has been introduced (i.e. ramsons, safflower, bitter oranges, black trumpets) or reinvigorated (rose petals). This trend corresponds to the remarkable changes in the local landscape ecology and agro-silvo-pastoral system that took place from the first half of the twentieth century, dramatically increasing woodland and secondary vegetation, and decreasing coppices, plantations, grasslands and segregating cultivated land. Conclusion The findings show a very difficult rearrangement of the LEK, as most of the areas the local actors still know are within their villages, and they no longer have daily experience in the rest of the abandoned woodland landscape (except for mushrooming and gathering chestnuts). This situation can be interpreted in two ways: as the start of the complete abandonment of the valley, or as a starting residual resilience lynchpin, which could possibly inspire new residents if the larger political-economic framework would promote measures for making the survival of the mountain settlements of this municipality possible, and not just a chimera.

This essay addresses the theme of the ambiguity of the commons by interweaving research methods and analytical tools from multiple disciplines. It focuses on a case study from the Ligurian Apennines featuring two communities engaged in a centuries-old dispute over ownership of collective resources. The authors examine clues to changes in the environmental resource management practices of woodlands and pastures, with particular attention to those concerning charcoal and hay production on common lands. Their aim is to identify changes in access rights, and thus in the organisation of local communities, by examining the relationships between the social actors and their environmental resources, in order to correlate the material evidence of the occupation, appropriation and use of common lands (fences, charcoal kilns, and wetlands, etc.) to variations in local ownership and usage practices, including those resulting from administrative reforms introduced by the central authorities.

The paper identifies the main contributions of Massimo Quaini to the problems of historical ecology in its South-European developments and to the definition of geographic-historical microanalysis within geography. It is on this ground that the work of the naturalists/ecologists has most dialogued with his geographical epistemology, starting from the dissatisfaction with the macro-categories of the global scale, the decontextualization of geographic facts and the problems of the “second biologization of the environment”, and drawing new perspectives for geographical action starting from the interpretation of rural and historical-environmental heritage.

Recently, the woodmanship practices and localized naturalistic knowledge have been acquired as indispensable for the European forest heritage conservation as well as for restoration of individual woodland landscapes. Minor importance has been given to the historical approach, both in the study of the local resources ecology and of the local societal context. Using the results of a series of case studies—applied to the knowledge and planning of sites that host present (or have hosted in past) wooded pasture systems and their environmental legacy—the chapter shows the interest of the environmental resource archeology (ERA): a “multisource approach” in reconstructing past management systems practices and underpinned lore. ERA is inspired by the method and sources of the English historical ecology and topographical history employing both archives and field evidences (palynology, anthracology, etc.).

Da diversi anni il Laboratorio di Archeologia e Storia Ambientale (cir-LASA) dell’Universita di Genova ha sviluppato un approccio indirizzato alla caratterizzazione dei processi storico-ambientali che, nel corso del tempo, hanno trasformato e definito i contenuti materiali (copertura vegetale/uso del suolo, forme dell’insediamento, morfologia ecc..) del paesaggio rurale. Questo approccio unisce all’analisi microanalitica storico-geografica delle fonti testuali e cartografiche l’archeologia delle risorse ambientali. L’obbiettivo e di individuare e caratterizzare pratiche e saperi locali considerati come processi storici alla base del funzionamento del paesaggio attuale. Partendo dall’assunto che le risorse ambientali in contesti rurali sono prodotti sociali attivati da specifiche pratiche agro-silvo-pastorali, il presente contributo presenta alcuni casi studio che hanno permesso di approfondire le dinamiche di trasformazione ambientale legate all’abbandono di queste attivita e conoscenze che hanno caratterizzato specifici paesaggi rurali liguri. I risultati di questi studi dimostrano come l’abbandono delle pratiche agro-silvo-pastorali sia una delle concause della perdita di biodiversita, dell’aumento del rischio idrogeologico e dell’incremento del rischio di incendi. Attraverso la ricostruzione delle dinamiche storiche di paesaggi specifici e della gestione delle risorse ambientali, si suggeriscono quindi nuove opportunita per un approccio allo sviluppo rurale sostenibile e un ruolo “applicativo” per la geografia storica in dialogo con altre discipline.

Il contributo propone l’approccio dell’ecologia storica quale necessario arricchimento della ‘scienza territorialista’, e in particolare della definizione di una storia territorialista delle risorse ambientali applicata al tema della possibile ricolonizzazione delle ‘terre alte’ abbandonate; questo anche al fine di rendere piu sicura la popolazione urbana che, vivendo nelle ‘terre basse’, e sempre piu spesso vittima dei dissesti causati dall’abbandono dei sistemi storici di controllo e gestione delle risorse ambientali, per lo piu allocati in quota. A partire dal caso studio della montagna litoranea genovese, la cui crescente esposizione a rischi idrogeologici mostra quanto insufficienti siano gli strumenti analitici normalmente applicati allo studio dei processi storici di biodiversificazione degli ambienti montani, l’obiettivo e quindi quello di renderli piu acuti anche al fine di individuare nuove politiche della montagna e di rafforzare la ‘resistenza’ delle societa locali a quelle nazionali ed europee quando incompatibili con il ‘progetto locale’ di cui sono portatrici. Questi nessi sono evidenziabili solo alla scala micro-storica, che si e venuta ridefinendo nel fecondo contatto tra le ricerche di geografia storica e la micro-storia sociale; che, di passaggio, rimette in discussione l’eccessiva genericita di categorie correnti nella pianificazione territoriale e ambientale, quali ‘uso del suolo’, beni ambientali, patrimonio, naturalizzazione e ri-naturalizzazione.

In the context of recent appeals for the adoption of historical perspectives emerging in environmental and conservation studies, ‘biodiversification processes’ would be considered as specific historical and historiographical topics. However, as highlighted in this paper, a broader discussion of the biodiversification processes as historical processes is needed. This paper discusses some consequences that are presented during the study of biodiversification processes when focusing on the links between cultural and biological diversity at the individual landscape level rather than on an overview of the current literature on the subject. In this discussion, we briefly underline dissimilarities in the methods adopted in historical ecology to those in the conventional historical approach nurtured in global environmental history where biodiversification processes, as subjects of historical study, are largely ignored or subsumed into general observations concerning global change or embedded in presumed ahistorical ‘traditional’ economies and practice systems. Such a broad reassessment is required before multi- or inter-disciplinary applications seek to answer ‘common questions’ (Szabó, Environ Conserv 37:380–387, 2010) in the field of environmental and cultural conservation studies. This paper comments on field and documentary evidence collected during multidisciplinary historical ecology approaches to research in the Northern Apennines (Italy) and Pyrenees (Franco-Spanish) sites. These site-level investigations suggest that medieval and post-medieval changes in local practices and systems of environmental resource production and activation appear to have been key drivers in co-related variations observed in the past biodiversity dynamics of the sites. In order to corroborate the sedimentary evidence (or traces of evidence) concerning taxonomic and habitat changes, historical ecology has proposed the adoption of a local approach in which a specific historical analysis and use of documentary and archival sources—as well as the archaeological and sedimentary evidence—has posed a number of new questions to the traditional use of archival and textual sources by professional historians. In doing so, it becomes clear that when observed at a local, topographical site-scale or on an individual landscape-scale, the links between biological and cultural diversity appear more clearly as historical products, rather than broad co-evolutionary issues relating to the ‘co-evolution of nature and culture’. These historically produced links between biological and cultural diversity—identified as biodiversification processes that can be uncovered and explored through the adoption of approaches from historical ecology—are the driving forces that ‘generate’ processes of circulation in local ecological knowledge and its related practices.

La rugosité du paysage géographique est une métaphore de sa matérialité. Contrairement à l’approche dominante qui pose au centre la perception, la prise en charge de la rugosité permettra d’identifier de nouvelles sources et méthodes pour l’étude historique des paysages ruraux par les traces matérielles. Le centre de la discussion est la contribution de l’écologie historique selon sa formulation dans le contexte italien des années 1990, lorsque on a établi un dialogue avec la microhistoire (dans sa version finale : nouvelle histoire locale). Quelques exemples de microanalyse géographique et historique de paysages ruraux individuels ont été pris à partir du récent Catalogo Nazionale dei Paesaggi Rurali Storici, par des cas d’étude soulignant les processus historiques de biodiversification.