Checklist for the Restoration of Cultural Landscapes

An interactive Documentation of the Variety of Restoration Measures

Supported by agricultural policy, habitat restoration has become a new and important trend in the cultural landscape. In many European countries the effect on biodiversity and sensual landscape quality is already well visible and documented.

However, experiences so far show that landscape development is a particular challenge and needs more conceptual background and creativity than the traditional conservation strategy. Even in most of the professionally elaborated projects only a small variety of "standard" restoration solutions are proposed and realized, such as planting hedges and trees, or restoration of extensive meadows. Mainly two reasons call for a greater diversity and creativity: First, a landscape includes much more development perspectives than just these few habitat types. Second, "standardised" planning may prevent the development of or even destroy an individual regional landscape character.

Therefore we screened the literature and the available practical experiences and put together all the variety of restoration measures we found. We present it in the form of a checklist (available only in german). For farmers and planners it may give ideas and help finding landscape-adequate and original solutions for landscape development projects and restoration endeavors. The checklist is completed with some practical information, hints for special suitability and literature links.