Indicators of agricultural intensity and intensification: a review of the literature
Since the 1960s, research has dealt with agricultural intensification (AI) as a solution to ensure global food security. Recently, sustainable intensification (SI) has increasingly been used to describe those agricultural and farming systems that ensure adequate ecosystem service provision. Studies differ in terms of the application scales and methodologies, thus we aim to summarize the main findings from the literature on how AI and SI are assessed, from the farm to global levels. Our literature review is based on 7865 papers selected from the Web of Science database and analysed using CorText software. A further selection of 105 relevant papers was used for an in-depth full-text analysis …
Agri-urban patterns in Mediterranean urban regions: the case study of Pisa
International audience; Urban regions require planning tools in order to manage agricultural areas under urban pressure. The aim of our paper is to test an analytical framework that combines both the composition in urban and agricultural land covers and their spatial configuration into four general agri-urban patterns: isolated fields, urban belt fields, periurban agricultural areas and rural areas. We evaluated the spatial distribution and the changes of such patterns in the short-term (2003-2011) starting from Spot images for the case study of Pisa, Italy. The results indicate an increase of the most urban patterns despite continuing to have cash crops, a stability of periurban agricultur…