Competence Center Cultural Landscape (CULT)

The network sees itself as a ‘thinking factory’, which promotes the technical discourse on new and current topics between experts from science and practice and develops initiatives from them. These can be education and information, as well as research and practical projects.

It wants to represent the “state-of-the-art” on current issues of nature conservation and landscape development, identify any gaps in knowledge and implementation, and also show possible solutions.

If you would like to be included in the network, please send us an email.

The niche of the Competence Center is the close networking of science and practical application; especially here there are major deficits in the federal and state governments.

A network is being set up consisting of application-oriented funders, researchers, and practice partners, who are all interested in the direct implementation of research results in their daily work.

As a result, work is being carried out in a more practice-oriented way than before on the most urgent issues of cultivated landscape development. To do this, people of various disciplines network with each other.

The plan is to create a modular, occupational training system, offering varying training formats ranging from one-day or multi-day seminars to part-time master's degrees.

This further education program is not to be found in Geisenheim alone, but in a nationwide network. Methods of self-determined eLearning with presence phases are used in many cases.

The digital system KuLaDig (Kulturlandschaft Digital) was developed for the recording and presentation of cultural landscape elements. It is used to solve a variety of different cultural landscape problems, for example in regional development, nature conservation, environmental education and tourism. To support networking among the various KuLaDig actors and to release synergies for the future, a transnational KuLaDig working group was founded under the umbrella of the CULT. It meets at regular intervals.

Ecosystem services provided by nature are of fundamental importance for human life, because the cultural landscape and landscape development cannot function without fertile soils, clean and available water, biodiversity, natural hazard protection and nature's recreational services. Agro-ecosystems are components of the cultural landscape which themselves provide ecosystem services, which in turn have a negative impact on nature's services if they are not managed sustainably: nitrate pollution, pesticide residues, water pollution, soil erosion or monocultures reduce our quality of life.

At regular meetings, the Working Group on Ecosystem Services in the Competence Center Cultural Landscape deals with the future development of the cultural landscape and how the concept of ecosystem services can be used as an instrument of landscape development. Contact person is Dr. Martin Reiss at the Hochschule Geisenheim University.