Birgitte Skar

World Heritage status as a foundation for building local futures? A case study from Vega in Central Norway

World Heritage Sites (WHSs) are motivated by such diverse reasons as heritage celebration, alarm calls, tourism branding and marketing and place making. Irrespective of the primary motivation for their creation, WHSs are often used to develop tourism based on cultural and natural resources of international significance. Heritage conservation may or may not be in agreement with what local populations perceive as desirable development paths. We conducted a survey among the island community of Vega in Norway that received WHS status in 2004 motivated by conservation alarm, tourism marketing and place making. We examined the local populations views of the key aspects of future development and how this related to WHS status. The islanders placed high value on social and community conditions as well as heritage linked to cultural and natural resources. While a majority supported tourism based on sustainable use of heritage they also felt that WH listing should not limit development opportunities. There were differences between younger people and adults. WHS may be an effective agent of sustainable tourism development if the main goals and strategies of the WHS are clearly understood and prioritized in the local community, leave room and perhaps link to other development opportunities.

Natural and cultural heritage in mountain landscapes: towards an integrated valuation

Mountain areas of Europe have been managed by humans for a long time, leading to a prevalence of semi-natural habitats in mountain landscapes today. These landscapes contain both natural and cultural heritage; however, natural and cultural heritage are rarely considered together when valuing landscapes and developing management plans in protected areas. Here we present a case study of seven protected areas in the mountains of Great Britain and Norway. We take a long-term perspective on landscape and land-use change and propose an integrated model of landscape valuation on the basis of combined natural and cultural heritage. Our model plots indicators of natural and cultural heritage along a gradient of land-use intensity, allowing simultaneous assessment and highlighting how valuation depends on what type of heritage is considered. We show that while contemporary land-use changes follow similar trajectories in Norway and Britain, different land-use histories mean that the loss of heritage differs between the regions. The model presented here thus allows for the consolidation of valuation based on both cultural and natural heritage in landscapes.

Genomics of Mesolithic Scandinavia reveal colonization routes and high-latitude adaptation

Scandinavia was one of the last geographic areas in Europe to become habitable for humans after the last glaciation. However, the origin(s) of the first colonizers and their migration routes remain unclear. We sequenced the genomes, up to 57x coverage, of seven hunter-gatherers excavated across Scandinavia and dated to 9,500-6,000 years before present. Surprisingly, among the Scandinavian Mesolithic individuals, the genetic data display an east-west genetic gradient that opposes the pattern seen in other parts of Mesolithic Europe. This result suggests that Scandinavia was initially colonized following two different routes: one from the south, the other from the northeast. The latter followed the ice-free Norwegian north Atlantic coast, along which novel and advanced pressure-blade stone-tool techniques may have spread. These two groups met and mixed in Scandinavia, creating a genetically diverse population, which shows patterns of genetic adaptation to high latitude environments. These adaptations include high frequencies of low pigmentation variants and a gene-region associated with physical performance, which shows strong continuity into modern-day northern Europeans.

World heritage and landscape change – heritage buildings and their changed visibility in the coastal landscape of Vega, Norway

Part of the Vega archipelago in north-western Norway is a cultural landscape listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Its buffer zone comprises most of the main island of Vega, where agriculture is an important land use. The authors describe interdisciplinary research carried out in the buffer zone. The research revealed the significant role of agriculture for the maintenance of the traditional open coastal landscape. The finding was further underlined by the fact that many visitors to the site never reach the outer archipelago, which is the core of the listed site. Based on interpretations of aerial photographs, land cover maps were produced for three cross-sections in time (1965, 1986, and 2009). A further reclassification of the land cover was performed to capture the change in openness due to change in land cover. Viewshed maps of each building found on the aerial photographs were overlain with the openness classes to capture the visual consequences of the buildings due to changes in land cover. A marked decrease in open land surrounding the buildings was found in the study area, which comprised Holand and Floa-Kjul in Vega Municipality, which in turn comprises the islands of the Vega archipelago. The regrowth of the land seemed to be happening regardless of building category.