CHARACTERIZATION OF MEDITERRANEAN VEGAS AND HUERTAS AS BIOCULTURAL LANDSCAPES

The concept of biocultural landscapes, i.e. landscapes with biotic and cultural elements connected to each other by historical-ecological interaction on the territory (Pungetti, 2012) is gradually gaining interest as an approach to characterise, plan and manage spaces of high biocultural diversity. In turn, the biocultural diversity, a term promoted to raise awareness for culture-biodiversity interrelationships (Burgüi et al., 2015), may be defined as the diversity of life in all of its manifestations, which are interrelated within a complex socio-ecological adaptive system (Maffi, 2005). In fact, biocultural landscapes are also defined as spaces that act as buffers so that biocultural diversity may be developed in a sustainable manner (Hong, 2014). As an emerging approach, there may be pending tasks to be better conceptualised and operationalised.

At this point, we make our contribution by focusing on the case of Mediterranean vegas and huertas. They are agricultural peri-urban landscapes (see Meeus, 1995; Mata and Fernández, 2004; Pérez-Campaña, 2015) linked to historical irrigation systems, especially in the Spanish and Moroccan Mediterranean area. The particular co-evolution process between natural and human forces in the Mediterranean (Tello, 1999) has a great representative in these landscapes, which are now experiencing deep changes affecting both their ecological and cultural content.

Even if all European landscapes may be considered predominantly biocultural and multi-functional (JP-BiCuD, 2010; Agnoletti and Rotherham, 2015), some specific aspects of vegas and huertas make them especially interesting to be approached as biocultural landscapes, as follows:
-They originate from centuries of human intervention since the Muslim or Roman Period (Trillo, 2005; Hermosilla and Iranzo, 2010); a long history of human influence which is an especially interesting characteristic to apply a biocultural approach (Agnoletti et al. 2015);
-They enclose many traditional cultural features (e.g. the traditional irrigation system of acequias), which are likely to function as memory carriers (Andersson and Barthel, 2016);
-They enclose high ecological values linked to the traditional cultural features (Pérez-Campaña, 2013);
-They represent complex landscape mosaics (Pérez-Campaña and Valenzuela, 2017), which are considered a common feature of many traditional landscapes (Agnoletti et al., 2015);
-They have been traditionally managed by small-scale farmers, what is frequently associated with higher biocultural diversity (JP-BiCuD, 2010) and present a particularly fine-grained landscape mesh.

Thus, in our work we try to provide specific biocultural indicators derived from detailed analysis of the landscape structure and the landscape multifunctionality of a group of selected vegas and huertas. These biocultural indicators are thought to contribute both to the biocultural landscape approach itself and to enhance the biocultural awareness drive concerning vegas and huertas.