Dr. Felipe Benra, SESI member and research associate in the professorship for sustainable landscapes at Leuphana University, just came back from field studies in southern Chile. He has very interesting insights to share about his journey and the case study – and so he wrote a super exclusive guest contribution for you. Enjoy!

In many places of the world, land surface to create traditional protected areas is scarce. So called “working landscapes” – the landscapes where people live, work and thrive – don’t seem to receive the attention they deserve. That’s why it came as a surprise to me when I realized during a field campaign in southern Chile that people are indeed very interested in conservation and restoration and that they want to be part of the solution.

The fieldwork campaign was conducted on a dairy working landscape in southern Chile in the frame of a future application of a DFG Emmy Noether program. It consisted of interviews with landowners designed to obtain insights about motivations and values for restoration. Through a deep collaboration and understanding of the landowners’ culture in the area, we were able to conduct 100 interviews.
(By “we” here I mean myself and primarily my colleague Victor Vergara. He is a farmer’s son and therefore well acquainted with the area. That local knowledge seemed to pay off because he was welcomed there with open arms.)

We got to know beautiful places which are not quite open to the public sphere, and we learned about geographies of several municipalities in the region. The idea of this case study was to understand the perspective and socio-ecological conditions of landowners/managers who own properties along seven rivers in the region. The selection of these rivers is based on their condition of linear landscape features that allow for several types of connectivity and for movement of local (and introduced) flora and fauna. We also wanted to see which type of land cover the landowners are willing to restore: Rather grasslands or forests (which are the dominant land covers in the study area)?

With the data collected through the interviews, we will now be able to make connections between social and ecological variables and find out how they interplay to possibly enable restoration.

Overall, we gained access to 100 properties with a total area of 13,968 hectares. Most of the landowners (95 %) agreed that we access their properties again in the future to establish experiments there. It is still up for question where exactly the experiments will be located (within the properties), but we will work on this as part of the proposal to DFG.

I am personally very happy with the field study and hope to obtain some nice insights – and why not come up with a couple of papers out of the data? Maybe you’ll even spot one or another here… ; )

If you’re interested in Felipe’s work and want to know more about it or follow his project-journey, contact him via e-mail (felipe.benra@leuphana.de) or keep track on any news about it on the SESI website.

Text by Isabelle Andres