Preserving Hyblaean heritage: navigating conservation challenges in a dynamic landscape

The traditional rural landscape of the Hyblaean Region (SE-Sicily) bears extraordinary cultural, ecological and aesthetic interest. It holds important archaeological sites, reflecting human interactions with the ecosystems over generations, and serves as a living record of traditional farming practices that have preserved through the centuries an extraordinary floristic richness and the integrity of natural dynamic processes. At best these contexts are protected by landscape or archaeological conservation acts, because regulations and indices that apply strictly naturalistic criteria are poorly suitable to identify rural landscapes as conservation targets, because they are mostly based on the occurrence of rare habitats and species or on vegetation structure and data collectors tend to overlook rural areas. To fill this gap, besides of collecting new data, efforts should be made to include criteria related to landscape heterogeneity and to the integrity of ecosystem dynamics in the naturalness evaluation indices. This is particularly important because current mitigation strategies and regulatory frameworks tend to identify forest vegetation as the maximum expression of naturalness in the area, with a clear risk for the survival of cultural landscapes of great value, not only due to land abandonment but also to reckless interventions aimed at promoting the wood recovery.