The borders of the Biosphere reserve ‚Swabian Alb‘ are defined and now they start to develop the biosphere concept. The basic for a successful Biosphere reserve and its concept is the acceptance of it and motivated local people. In such planning processes is a need of local identity with the landscape to reach the success. Saying it in a worst case scenario – If there would be no acceptance, because the concept isn’t regarding to the local identity – it could fale and they would miss the chance of sustainable regional development and nature protection. How to find out the authentic identity of landscape and there people? First of all it is important to think about the relationships of landscape including social aspects. So, the first step was to develop a system diagram.
The way how to reach authentic identity of landscape and there people is the aim. Exploring a method to get to know more than only one dimension of landscape. All is related to landscape and it is a multidimensional object. To get the identity means to find out landscape structures and social aspects as well. To get different point of views a mix of methods is used. It is a combination of interview via telephone, survey and personal impressions via internet (sending me a favorite picture of their home landscape).
The method belongs to qualitative social studies. Criteria of it are: only a few informants, pre- selected informants (criteria: relation to System Flow Diagram, Networker), no samples, no statistical analysis (no quantitative questions). With open designed questions it is an experiment to describe landscape scenery and its identity only by interviewed people and their impressions. Finally there were authentic answers because of the open questions. This is an advantage of this method mix. Moreover it was efficient to take notes while interviewing the people. There was a huge range of different answers and taking notes wasn’t efficient enough to get detailed emotions. It could happen that you get lost while trying to evaluate the Answers. But to my mind the experiment of a method was successful. This method shows at the end lots of different aspects of this landscape and especially of their identity. Especially the social aspect was quit interesting. It was e.g. mentioned that the cooperation between the people is still existing. They talked about old stories. These are aspects you are not able to find them out in an only objective way of describing. You can get an authentic information background about the region. That’s why I see this method I explored as an information help – at this moment. This information can be helpful for the Biosphere reserve team. You get to know local terms of landscape, you can get to know the mentality of the local people. And a lot of items concerning landscape elements. This kind of research – exploration has a high sentimental value you can get an understanding of this multi dimensional landscape – identity. With these background information you might get good arguments for planning processes. Nevertheless it was a pleasure to explore this multidimensional field.

- English Title : Biosphere Reserve Swabian Alb - Identity of the landschaft - exploring a Method
- University : Nürtingen-Geislingen University, DE
- Project was done for Course Unit : IMLA Schwerpunkt-Projekt I - 2010 ( IMLA Main project I - 2010 )
- Coordinates - Longitude: : 9.539415836334229000
- Coordinates - Latitude: : 48.416441588522190000
- Academic Year : 2010 / 11
- City : Nürtingen
- Project Language : German
- Supervisor : Prof. Dr. Roman Lenz, Prof. Dr. Christian Küpfer, Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Werner Rolf
- Location of project : Germany
- Image Title : Student Projects 2010 - Biosphere Reserve Swabian Alb