Traditional agriculture as cultural heritage. Forgotten agroforestry practices recorded in textual part of 19th century tax records
Abstract
Agroforestry - integration of trees with agricultural crops and/or livestock is a traditional land use/management practice in Europe. Trees as part of agriculture are still commonly used in Baltic, Scandinavian and Mediterranean region but in general these systems are on European level in decline due to their economic disadvantage in the intensive single-commodity-oriented agriculture and forestry.
With them vanish also the techniques of a complex long-term non-mechanized, non-chemized usage of semi-forested landscape, thus a cultural loss occurs. Meanwhile such extensive practices are thought to possibly help to mitigate the environmental problems caused or exacerbated by commercial agricultural and forestry production.
In particular trees planted throughout the agricultural ecosystems enhance besides the productive potential also habitat and species biodiversity and the regulation functions of essential ecological processes and life support systems. In previous research it was found that while nowadays the tradition of agroforestry in Czechia is nearly completely lost due to political, economic and demographic changes, in 1850s the agroforestry was a common practice.
With the help of previous Czechia-wide historical analysis the cadastres with the greatest abundance of agroforestry were identified and the historical textual tax records of management techniques used in agroforestry were analysed.
