Terraced landscapes

Terraced landscapes form a special agricultural and ecological system, and can be found around the entire globe. Based on their diverse forms, it is possible to speak of diverse agricultural and ecological systems. Terraces have been built by developed civilizations for millennia. They reflect a harmony between people and nature, and in many cases also a harmony between people. Terraced landscapes are landscapes with a special value, which reflect people’s creativity and their ability to adapt to natural conditions. On the one hand, cultivated terraces provide food, which enables people to survive, and, on the other, they have great scientific, cultural, historical, ecological, aesthetic, and even psychological, philosophical, and religious value.
Slovenia has an extremely diverse landscape and is among the few places in Europe with cultivated terraces throughout the entire country. As a typical landscape element, they appear in every type of Slovenian landscape, but differ in terms of frequency, form, purpose, and current function. Terraced landscapes can be defined as a complex landscape system, in which natural and social geographical subsystems are balanced in a sensitive way. Modern processes, such as globalization and economic integration, have a strong impact on terraced landscape systems. The Honghe Declaration on the protection and development of terraces, adopted in 2010 at the First World Conference on Terraced Landscapes, draws attention to this pressing and current issue and the special significance of terraced landscapes.
Despite the important landscape-forming role of cultivated terraces, Slovenian scholarship has not paid sufficient attention to this topic (with rare exceptions). This is especially true for geography, whose complex, cause-and-effect approach practically dictates that it unveil the many mysteries connected with the formation of terraced landscapes, their structure, the processes in them, and the demographic and economic effects on their maintenance and intensity of use.
By creating terraces, farmers retained more moisture in the soil and thus kept the soil moist longer; they also successfully prevented the negative effects of erosion, including soil erosion during heavy rain. They regulated drainage by tilting the terrace tread towards or away from the slope. They flattened the treads to make tilling easier, and the construction of access roads presented and continues to present a significant problem. Especially in viticulture, but also in orchard cultivation, gardening, and subsistence arable farming, obtaining farmland by creating terraces was important in hilly areas.
In terms of land use or various types of production, terraces can be divided into tilled, winegrowing, and orchard terraces. In Slovenian Istria, terraces were already built in Classical Antiquity. In recent years, winegrowing terraces have strongly predominated in terms of both scale and activity. Because of established mechanized production, terraced vineyards can be found across all of Slovenia.
The basic goal of the project is to perform a complex geographical evaluation of terraced landscapes based primarily on compilation of a comprehensive and systematic typology of Slovenian terraced landscapes, a statistical analysis of the codependence between the system of cultivated terraces and other landscape systems, and a definition of the multilayered significance of terraced cultural landscapes for modern society. The project will indicate the extent to which contemporary cultivated terraces contribute to the significance, identity, and economic structure of individual landscapes, and how to manage the risks that appear in many Slovenian terraced landscapes due to building cultivated terraces (intensive farming) and their deterioration (landslides) or changes.
The following pilot settlements have been selected for detailed research by natural geographical types of Slovenian landscapes: Krkavče in the Koper Hills (Mediterranean low hills), Merče in the Karst region (Mediterranean plateaus), Rut above the Bača Gorge (Alpine high mountains), Smoleva to the south of Železniki (Alpine hills), Rodine to the west of Begunje na Gorenjskem (Alpine plains), Dečja Vas in eastern White Carniola (Dinaric plateaus), Velika Slevica near Velike Lašče (Dinaric lowland and peneplains), and Jeruzalem in the eastern part of the Slovenian Hills (Pannonian low hills).