Things have been a little quiet on the DART website recently. This is mainly due to Ant spending quite a bit of his time coordinating, with Veronique De Laet at Leuven, a grant application for the Environmental theme of the FP7 funding round in a call entitled “Development of advanced technologies and tools for mapping, diagnosing, protecting and managing cultural landscapes in rural areas” (ENV.2013.6.2-7).  This is an opportunity to build on the outputs of DART in a way which has downstream impact on practice and policy. The Stage 1 application has been submitted today. We should hear if we’re through to stage 2 by December 2012

The project summary is as follows:

Rural landscapes across Europe are being transformed by land management, climate change and urban expansion. These threaten our rural heritage at all scales from individual buried remains to the entire historic landscape. The threats are made worse by our unreliable knowledge of this heritage and the uneven approach to the management and monitoring of its condition across Europe. Responding to the threats effectively and efficiently is challenging. Decision-makers and other stakeholders need access to reliable science-based information in order to frame cost-effective and sustainable responses, especially in a complex area such as agricultural policy.

THEMATIK is a pan-European project which will improve our understanding of the environmental and anthropogenic processes which threaten our landscape heritage. From this new methods will be developed for monitoring, detecting and characterising heritage landscapes, their state and their risks. Web-based tools and services will allow stakeholders to assess heritage resources. Reliable and accessible heritage knowledge are key to maintaining flexible and cost effective strategies.

THEMATIK outputs will inform many policy processes ensuring that decisions on how best to adapt to pressures are based on solid scientific analysis. THEMATIK’s integrated assessment approach will enable stakeholders to explore, assess and understand the interactions between different sectors and how they could affect European landscape change and impact on heritage environments. This contributes to the development of more robust European policy by building the capacity of decision-makers to understand cross-sectoral vulnerability and how it might be reduced by various adaptations. The integrated approach to landscape management at the heart of the European Landscape Convention demands cross-sector thinking to better inform sustainable policy responses.