Search results for "land-use change"
showing 10 items of 51 documents
The (Evolving) vineyard’s age structure in the valencian community, Spain. A new demographic approach for rural development and landscape analysis
2019
Vineyards have assumed a key role as rural landmarks in recent decades. Investigating vineyard dynamics and contexts may reveal various economic, cultural, and environmental aspects of rural landscapes, which can be linked to land-use changes and major soil degradation processes, including soil erosion. As a contribution to rural landscape studies, the purpose of this work is to investigate the spatial distribution of vineyard plots in the Valencian community, located in the eastern area of the Iberian Peninsula, focusing on the final product, the type of vineyard and how long each vineyard has been settled over time. The work provides a comprehensive analysis of a wine-growing landscape, c…
Land forms, land-use and landscapes in Sicily
2009
Landscape as we perceive it is the product of many different interacting factors: macro- and topoclimate, lithology, geomorphology, land use and human activities. The evaluation of the relative influence of each one of these factors on vegetation pattern and landscape is strongly dependent from the scale of observation. Hierarchical classification (Blasi et al. 2000) makes scale-related use of these factors as diagnostic attributes: macroclimate (over 1:250,000 scale) defines landscape regions, lithology (1:250,000 scale) defines systems and lithomorphology (1:50,000 scale) defines subsystems. At a finer scale (less than 1:10,000), land forms and land-use are the predominant landscape maker…
An Inventory Approach to the Assessment of Main Traditional Landscapes in Sicily (Central Mediterranean Basin)
2012
EU policy for the conservation of cultural landscapes is of particular importance for a region such as Sicily (Italy) which is the site of many Mediterranean traditional cultural landscapes as well as new landscapes created by contemporary agriculture. Such variety of landscape, however, is not supported or confirmed by specialised inventories that identify and classify the typical Main Traditional Landscape (MTL). On the basis of these considerations, the objective of the present paper is to draw up a preliminary inventory and present a brief characterisation of MTLs in Sicily, in line with the multidisciplinary experiences and approaches implemented at European and national levels. In def…
Climate Aridity and the Geographical Shift of Olive Trees in a Mediterranean Northern Region
2021
Climate change leverages landscape transformations and exerts variable pressure on natural environments and rural systems. Earlier studies outlined how Mediterranean Europe has become a global hotspot of climate warming and land use change. The present work assumes the olive tree, a typical Mediterranean crop, as a candidate bioclimatic indicator, delineating the latent impact of climate aridity on traditional cropping systems at the northern range of the biogeographical distribution of the olive tree. Since the olive tree follows a well-defined latitude gradient with a progressive decline in both frequency and density moving toward the north, we considered Italy as an appropriate case to i…
Climate change and human impact in central Spain during Roman times: High-resolution multi-proxy analysis of a tufa lake record (Somolinos, 1280m asl)
2012
The Roman Period is considered a crucial phase in the evolution of Holocene landscapes, due to the coincidence of major climatic, environmental, economic and cultural changes. However, there is still debate as to the regional expression of these changes, and to the mechanisms involved, particularly in the topographically and climatically complex region of the Mediterranean. In order to improve our understanding of the synergies between societal and environmental change during this period in central Spain, we present a comprehensive case study based on the integration of multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental, archaeological and historical data. High-resolution, interdisciplinary research has been …
LAND USE CHANGE DETECTION AS A BASIS FOR ANALYSING DESERTIFICATION PROCESSES: A CASE STUDY IN TABERNAS (ALMERIA, SPAIN)
2006
12 paginas, 5 figuras, 1 tabla. Proceedings of the NATO Mediterranean Dialogue Workshop on Desertification in the Mediterranean Region. A Security Issue -- Part III. Assessing land use change relative to anthropogenic and natural cause. Valencia, Spain 2-5 December 2003
Paired-site approach for studying soil organic carbon dynamics in a Mediterranean semiarid environment
2012
This work investigated the effects of land cover and land-use change (LUC) on the ability of a soil to store carbon (C) and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, in a Mediterranean area. Using a paired-site approach, we estimated the effect of land-cover change on the C stock from 1972 to 2008 in a natural reserve (Grotta di Santa Ninfa) in western Sicily. We selected 15 paired sites representative of five LUCs. We studied the effect of land use on soil organic C (SOC) content in bulk soil and in different particle-size fractions (2000–1000 µm, 1000–500 µm, 500–250 µm, 250–63 µm, 63–25 µm, and <25 µm). Laboratory incubation of the soil samples was conducted to measure CO2 evolution in bulk…
Making a rural landscape: ecological and human dynamics in the holm oak forest of Mt. Barraù (Corleone, Palermo, C-W Sicily)
2017
The Harvesting Memories Project (funded by Bona Furtuna LLC) aims to investigate the long-term landscape transformations in the central part of the Alto Belice Corleonese (Central-Western Sicily). The case study area is formed by a sequence of gentle hills (Contrade Castro and Giardinello), rich in water springs that offer an optimal condition for agricultural exploitation, irregularly interrupted by the Mt. Barraù (1420 m a.s.l.) with steep and abrupt slopes in the south-west side. The study of this territory is approached by an holistic perspective to detect and evaluate the relationships and the interactions among human activities and the environment. The holm oak forest that covers part…
Could cattle ranching and soybean cultivation be sustainable? A systematic review and a meta-analysis for the Amazon
2021
Abstract: Tropical forests are being destroyed to make space for agricultural activities with the assumption that they are required to feed the growing global population. Consequently, more sustainable practices are needed to guarantee food security and environmental protection of highly threatened natural biodiversity hotspots like the Amazon rainforest. Cattle ranching and soybean cultivation are by far the greater drivers of land use change and deforestation in the Amazon region. We performed a systematic review of papers related to these two main drivers and a meta-analysis on the effects of sustainable practices on different ecosystem services. The results of the review highlight a lar…
A Theoretical Learning Model Combining Stochastic Cellular Automata and Economic Indicators to Simulate Land Use Change
2015
The study of change in land use has been included in territorial planning to inform spatial planners and policy makers of the possible developments they face in order to optimize future management decisions. In this paper the authors present the core of an original learning model coupling stochastic Cellular Automata and economic indicators to simulate the land use change. This model is an important step in building an “environmental virtual laboratory” to explore, explain and forecast land use change.