Natural and cultural heritage in mountain landscapes: towards an integrated valuation

Mountain areas of Europe have been managed by humans for a long time, leading to a prevalence of semi-natural habitats in mountain landscapes today. These landscapes contain both natural and cultural heritage; however, natural and cultural heritage are rarely considered together when valuing landscapes and developing management plans in protected areas. Here we present a case study of seven protected areas in the mountains of Great Britain and Norway. We take a long-term perspective on landscape and land-use change and propose an integrated model of landscape valuation on the basis of combined natural and cultural heritage. Our model plots indicators of natural and cultural heritage along a gradient of land-use intensity, allowing simultaneous assessment and highlighting how valuation depends on what type of heritage is considered. We show that while contemporary land-use changes follow similar trajectories in Norway and Britain, different land-use histories mean that the loss of heritage differs between ...