Conserving European mountain habitats: what can their past tell us about their future?

This paper looks at the strategies needed for the conservation and sustainable use of some of Europe's most fragile ecosystems: mountain habitats. Despite their appearance as wildscape, many traditional mountain ecosystems are semi-natural habitats whose character has been shaped by past forms of land use management. In some cases, this symbiosis has evolved over many centuries, even millennia, giving a deceptive natural stability to the ecosystems involved. However, as mountain areas across Europe have been drawn into more specialised forms of farm production, the progressive abandonment of traditional husbandry practices, including range grazing by livestock, has led to a reduction and fragmentation of those ecosystems and to the loss of key species within them. Using two sample mountain areas, the Scottish Highlands and Jotunheimen of Norway, this paper focuses on how the presence of particular ecosystems and species needs to be seen within a specific rather than generalised framework of traditional land use management. It will reconstruct this framework, highlighting the differences between the two sample areas and showing how their traditional resource management has contributed to the ecological dynamics of traditional mountain habitats. Drawing on detailed field data at both a community and species level, it will highlight the effect that changes to this traditional resource management have had on mountain habitats.