Working Landscapes of the Spanish Dehesa and the California Oak Woodlands: An Introduction

Abstract

Oak woodlands have offered a welcoming environment for human activities for tens of thousands of years, but how that history has unfolded has many variations. The long-time collaboration that led to this book ran into complications arising from the different meanings attached to many a term, including struggles over the most appropriate title, settling on common units of measurement and area, quantifying the woodland’s extent in Spain and California, and even in deciding how many oaks constitute a woodland. Defining with anything approaching international precision such terms as oak woodlands, oak woodland ranches, and wooded dehesas is nuanced, and is compounded by distinctions in culture and language. But our efforts to dovetail one inscrutable system with another may offer insight into the relationship of humans with environments long occupied and modified, as further shaped by location, history, and opportunity. In 15 chapters we offer a comparison of conservation and management on California oak woodland ranches and in the dehesas of Spain, including economic, institutional, ecological, spatial, and geographical aspects, from how to raise an Iberian pig to what we can learn about oak woodlands with remote sensing.