Denmark seen from above: communicating landscape change

One fundamental task for landscape ecologists is to create a public awareness about the on-going structural changes in the landscape. It is widely accepted academically that biodiversity and landscape connectivity has suffered because of intensification and structural development of agricultural areas. But the communication of these changes and their consequences in the landscape is becoming increasingly difficult. Landscape change happens at a relatively slow rate compared to the perception of humans. In addition a growing proportion of the population now lives in urban environments and as a result most people do not have an every-day experience with rural landscapes change. In order to inform a wider range of people, in competition with other types of information, the story has to have a point of reference of which people without specific training in landscape research can relate to. This poster will explore the potential for a new way of communicating landscape change to a broader public audience by using a newly developed portal with digitized and geo-referenced historical oblique aerial photographs from 1939 to 1990s, provided by the Danish Royal Library. The basic idea is, popularly speaking to “show” the change in the landscape rather than just “tell” about it in scientific reports and statistics. Because of the local scale of images, and national data coverage, the portal makes it possible to connect local experience with knowledge about larger scale landscape ecological processes. Especially the possibility to view the change of the local landscape in the neighbourhood presents a good starting point for discussions and critical reflection of the changes taking place in the landscape, which are the point of reference for people in their understanding of their environment. In order to make people care, they need to know.