A social-ecological analysis of co-production of Mediterranean terrace landscapes

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tobias Plieninger
• Subject Area: Ecology of Land Use ; Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555824450

To understand how co-production of people and nature determines the structures and services of ecosystems is a central challenge of sustainability research. This project investigates an outstanding landscape type that local communities have co-produced and maintained over centuries: Cultivated terraces, a biodiversity- and ecosystem services-rich landscape type that is found all over the Mediterranean Basin. The overall aim of the project is to generate new understanding of how a social-ecological systems approach can support the transformation of threatened terrace landscapes toward sustainability, focusing on and advancing the notion of co-production. The project will foster a “people and nature” research paradigm by bringing concepts of co-production and the empirical realities of Mediterranean terrace landscapes into dialogue. It will advance understanding of co-production along four major dimensions: a) Landscape structures, b) Land-use legacies, c) Values-rules-knowledge, d) Landscape stewardship. These four conceptual cornerstones are reflected in four specific objectives and work packages within the project: 1. To classify the diversity of natural and human co-production in cultivated terraces; 2. To analyse the taxonomic diversity, vegetation composition, and conservation status of traditionally used plants across a gradient of co-production; 3. To elicit the interplay of local ecological knowledge, values, and rules in terraces that are shaped by different types of co-production; 4. To identify visions pathways for stewardship of terrace landscapes. The proposed project is inherently interdisciplinary, building on concepts and methods from the land-use sciences, the ecological sciences, and the social sciences to empirically test a number of social-ecological hypotheses. The analyses will be performed in an archetypical case of a Mediterranean terrace landscape, the Jerte valley of Spain. Among the expected results are: an empirically grounded typology of co-production in cultivated terraces; an inventory of traditionally used plant species as legacies of past and present land uses; a categorization of different bundles of values, rules, and knowledge types around terrace management; and a knowledge co-production approach to envision desirable futures for terrace landscapes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants