Heritage, Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services: Boundaries and Linear Landscape Features in the Lower Severn Vale
Author(s): John Powell, Jeremy Lake, Rob Berry, Peter Gaskell, Paul Courtney
This project is one of a series of pilot projects that seek to address the need for the heritage sector to better engage with the ecosystem services approach to assess the benefits that cultural heritage can provide to people’s health, wellbeing and prosperity. Understanding and capturing variability in the landscape context of historic linear features is the focus of this project. The key objectives for the project are: • Develop a research methodology for recording the public and environmental benefits (goods and services) arising from the historic environment, and specifically flowing from linear features in the Lower Severn Vale. • Identify those benefits in a way that is compatible with ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’ approaches. • Attribute value (economic and non-economic) to those benefits (services). • Identify other values that fall outside the ecosystem services framework that can be ascribed to heritage assets. • Provide the heritage and natural environment sectors with case study examples, tested at different scales of application, of how this might work for different environmental contexts. The project builds on existing techniques for valuing the benefits of market and non-market goods and services and has tested the scope for integrating a range of digital and GIS mapping data into the accounting methodology. The project was carried out in the Lower Severn Vale (LSV), which is situated within the Severn and Avon Vales National Character Area (NCA) and flanked by the Cotswolds and the Forest of Dean NCAs, offering a range of settings to explore the variability of historic linear features and the benefits they offer. Linear features comprise field boundaries, routeways, and other forms of physical structure such as flood protection barriers and drainage features around the River Severn (dykes, embankments, ditches, channels, etc.). The three case studies, which were chosen in consultation with Historic England, were selected in order to explore variations within areas marked by similar characteristics bordering both sides of the Severn.
- Report Number:
- 8/2019
- Series:
- Research Report
- Pages:
- 107
- Keywords:
- National Character Areas
