Project description
Looking to the past to grow sustainable agriculture
Global warming and the unchecked expansion of drylands threaten agricultural sustainability, particularly in arid regions. These changes impact biodiversity and disrupt traditional farming practices. As resources become scarcer, understanding how ancient farmers managed their landscapes is crucial for future resilience. The loss of heritage horticulture knowledge further exacerbates challenges to food security. In this context, the ERC-funded BOSTAN TREE project will investigate the ecological history and cultivar diversity of heritage horticulture in four distinct arid regions of southern Israel. By integrating interdisciplinary scientific methods from the humanities and natural sciences with a citizen science framework, the project aims to develop models that apply ancient agricultural wisdom to modern socioeconomic contexts.
Objective
Engaging with the myriad challenges linked to global warming and the unchecked expansion of drylands, the project seeks to develop models for implementing past agricultural know-how in modern socioeconomic contexts. Our novel methodology fuses cutting-edge interdisciplinary scientific approaches from the humanities and natural sciences with an inclusive citizen science framework to examine the ecological history and cultivar diversity of relic ‘heritage horticulture’ in four distinct arid regions in southern Israel. Focusing on the bioarchaeology of trees, we will define the historical, biological and environmental principles of dryland heritage horticulture systems and create a method for the exploration, analysis and ultimate dissemination of the crucial data they contain. When combined, this exceptional compendium of perspectives—coupling broad socio-geographical scientific viewpoints with more precise biogenetic, archaeological, and natural science analytics—can expand our understanding of the factors that drove the sustainability of heritage horticulture in marginal areas. The outcome of our study—an archaeologically informed grasp of ancient agrarian resilience—can transform the field of environmental history and impact present-and-future agricultural dynamics. Indeed, viewing trees as a singular analytical unit is unprecedented, as is our interdisciplinary survey of both the dormant and living artifacts contained within these archaeological contexts. Hence, deep knowledge of how bygone farmers related to the landscape and managed their limited resources, particularly the terrain, soil and water, holds vital implications for climate change adaptation and current-day food security. Moreover, the unique history of dryland farming and its remarkable development in marginal regions can inspire landscape policy management initiatives and community engagement programs that promote cultural heritage restoration and landscape reclamation.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecology
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturehorticulture
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologybioarchaeology
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
31905 Haifa
Israel