'Horsiculture': how important a land use change in Scotland?

[Extract] Rural areas are now widely recognised as supplying a range of goods and services to people living in urban communities, with one of the fastest developing forms of land use being recreation (Ravenscroft & Long, 1994). In the context of falling agricultural commodity prices, farm-based recreation is a potentially important form of diversification (Ilbery, 1989; Bailey et al., 2000). Recreation also changes the nature of land management, which may have important implications for the rural landscape and environmental features of the rural ecosystems (Gordon. et al., 1989). The growing importance of equestrianism as a UK leisure activity has, in turn, promoted the development of 'horsiculture', with many horses being grazed outdoors for part of the year on land formerly used for livestock grazing (Mellor et al., 1999,2001).\ud \ud The aim of this work is to draw attention to the importance of equestrianism as a determined land-use change within rural areas and how this form of land use is likely to be underestimated in the agriculturally-based information gathering exercises currently conducted by the Scottish Executive

Social representations of an alpine grassland landscape and socio-political discourses on rural development

Understanding how changes in ecosystem properties feedback into land-use decisions remains relatively uncharted territory for land science in general and for ecosystem service science in particular. In Europe, debates on rural development can be framed in terms of opposing socio-political discourses. These include formulations of desirable, acceptable and unacceptable changes that contribute to changing the planning- and policy-based drivers of land-use decisions. We explored the relationships between such discourses and local descriptions of a mountain grassland area in the central French Alps documented using semi-structured interviews. We found that descriptions focused on either the (1) productive functions of the local grasslands, (2) the aesthetic qualities of the surrounding landscape or (3) its cultural heritage value (testimony to past land-use patterns and practices). We interpreted these descriptions as social representations and found that they were unequally represented in existing socio-political discourses identified at the European level, thus illustrating some strong political barriers between local perceptions of landscape changes and the policy drivers of those changes

Corrigendum to : "New handbook for standardised measurement of plant functional traits worldwide"

The authors regret that elements of Appendix 1 were incorrect in the original publication. The correct version of Appendix 1 is given in this corrigendum