Present Changes in European Rural Landscapes - Landscape Modelling: Geographical Space, Transformation and Future Scenarios - page 21

There is the danger of a decrease in ecosystem and landscape diversity in the future
if climax communities predominate.
Generally speaking, we can distinguish “wet wilderness” existing on wet sites
(especially in alluvial plains) and “dry (xeric) wilderness” on xeric sites (steep
slopes with rock outcrops).

2.6.3 Importance (and Advocacy) of the Existence of the New
Wilderness

As discussed above, human beings are the primary cause of the formation of wilder-
ness in the cultural landscape. But localities where this development takes place are
predetermined by natural conditions in the first place. Agricultural lands remain
abandoned especially in areas not suitable for modern large-scale technologies
involved in agricultural production like steep slopes of valleys and seasonally or
permanently wet stands in undrained alluvial plains along water streams. Significant
regional differences in distribution of abandoned lands between lowlands and high-
lands are also firstly caused by natural conditions (Lipský, Kopecký, & Kvapil,
1999).
In contrast with the process of intensification, environmental and landscape eco-
logical consequences of marginalisation and abandonment of agricultural lands are
accepted inconsistently even by specialists. While intensification, widely described
and analysed in many countries, is evaluated negatively from the landscape ecology
point of view, the process of extensification has not been evaluated consistently and
uniformly. Some changes are universally welcomed, others may cause conflicts.
Changes that are positive in some respects may be negative for other landscape
values. A topical problem stems from the risk of elemental abandoning of agricul-
tural land cultivation in marginal regions, which intrinsically promotes the danger of
rural region depopulation, breakdown of historical settlement structure, extinction
of characteristic features and aesthetic values of the traditional cultural landscape
(Jongman, 1996).
Different aspects, both positive and negative, of the process of rewilding and exis-
tence of the new wilderness in the contemporary cultural landscape are summarised
in Table 2.3.
Igor Míchal (2002) noted four leading motives for letting the process of rewil-
ding take its course and for protecting such new wilderness in the present cultural
landscape of the Central Europe:

- Ecological (this concerns knowledge of natural processes especially succes-
sion of communities, biogeochemical cycles, trophic chains, ecological stability,
biodiversity, island biogeography etc.);
- Utilisation-functional (importance of nature for man, wise use, caring manage-
ment and servanthood stewardship);
- Ethical (positive ethical relations to wilderness resulting from ideal inte-

gration of man and nature, appreciation of inner values of nature and

wildlife);
- Psychological-emotional (wilderness as the opposite to a managed landscape,
positive emotional relations to natural elements).