Landscape Transformation under Global Environmental Change in Mediterranean Mountains: Agrarian Lands as a Guarantee for Maintaining Their Multifunctionality

Crumbotti and rose petals in a ghost mountain valley: foraging, landscape, and their transformations in the upper Borbera Valley, NW Italy

BACKGROUND

The abandonment of mountain areas in Europe is a process that started during industrialisation and whose traces are still present nowadays. Initiatives aimed at stopping this decline and preserving the local biological and cultural diversities reflect the crucial issue of fostering sustainable rural development. This article contributes to the ongoing debate in assessing and preserving local ecological knowledge (LEK) in a highly marginalised mountain community in the Piedmontese Apennines to support local development. In so doing, it continues a larger project assessing how local botanical knowledge and landscapes evolve over time, in order to understand in more depth which factors affect how LEK is shaped, eroded, and re-created, and how this could be revitalised.

METHODS

We compared information about the current gathering and use of local wild plants in the upper Borbera Valley (Carrega Ligure municipality, NW Italy), elicited via 34 in-depth open and semi-structured interviews, with the findings of a field study conducted in the same location, most likely carried out at the end of the 1970s and published in 1981.

RESULTS

There were remarkable quantitative and qualitative differences between the two ethnobotanies. The gathering and use of some wild medicinal plants growing in meadows, woodlands, and higher mountain environments (Achillea, Centaurea, Dianthus, Ostrya, Picea, Polygonum, Potentilla, and Thymus) seems to have disappeared, whereas the collection of plants growing in more anthropogenic environments, or possibly promoted via contacts with the "reference" city of Genoa (the largest city close to Carrega and historically the economic and cultural centre to which the valley was mostly connected), has been introduced (i.e. ramsons, safflower, bitter oranges, black trumpets) or reinvigorated (rose petals). This trend corresponds to the remarkable changes in the local landscape ecology and agro-silvo-pastoral system that took place from the first half of the twentieth century, dramatically increasing woodland and secondary vegetation, and decreasing coppices, plantations, grasslands and segregating cultivated land.

CONCLUSION

The findings show a very difficult rearrangement of the LEK, as most of the areas the local actors still know are within their villages, and they no longer have daily experience in the rest of the abandoned woodland landscape (except for mushrooming and gathering chestnuts). This situation can be interpreted in two ways: as the start of the complete abandonment of the valley, or as a starting residual resilience lynchpin, which could possibly inspire new residents if the larger political-economic framework would promote measures for making the survival of the mountain settlements of this municipality possible, and not just a chimera.

Sustainable Rural Development: Strategies, Good Practices and Opportunities

In 2020, a special issue titled “Sustainable Rural Development: Strategies, Good Practices and Opportunities” was launched, in which 16 papers were published [...]

Are Agrarian Areas in Mediterranean Mountain Regions Becoming Extinct? A Methodological Approach to Their Conservation

Mediterranean mountain regions have undergone several landscape changes since the end of the 19th century due to progressive depopulation and the abandonment of cattle rearing, forestry, charcoal production and agricultural activity. Such activity favored landscape dynamics by creating grassy habitats, which in turn resulted in greater landscape diversity. This is now being lost as the forest reclaims abandoned pastures. Thus, the purpose of this work was to identify those open habitats most in need of management action to maximize biodiversity and cultural heritage conservation and minimize fire risk and management costs. These analyses show a sharp decrease of open agriculture areas, which are the habitat of many endemic species (from 46.4% to 12.3%), currently overgrown with secondary forests. Multivariate analysis and the PGP (Patch Growing Process) heuristic model indicate the areas in which the restoration of open areas (by about 8%; about 500 ha) will be the most advisable and the most beneficial, taking into account environmental, social and economic factors. The use of PGP provides for a 21% improvement in total agriculture areas. Still, the natural state of the protected Mediterranean mountain area “Alta Garrotxa” (Catalonia, Spain) is almost continuous forest. However, the management models proposed in this study offer flexible precepts to achieve the desired landscape patterns and maintain biodiversity, while conserving cultural heritage and decreasing the risk of fire.

Landscape Pattern Changes in the Xingkai Lake Area, Northeast China

Understanding landscape change is important for ecologically sustainable development. In this paper, we assessed the spatiotemporal variations of landscape pattern in the Xingkai Lake area using remote sensing data from 1982, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015. Landscape patterns of marshlands, paddy fields, dry farmlands, and their combinations were analyzed at class and landscape levels. We examined the stability of landscape types through principal component analysis based on class level indices for landscape types. The results indicated that marshland areas decreased significantly by 33.87% but paddy fields increased by 1.84 times from 1982 to 2015. The largest conversion of dry farmlands to paddy fields was 90.88 km² during the period 2010–2015. In contrast, the largest conversion of paddy fields to dry farmlands was 86.03 km² during the period 2000–2005. The difference in relative change revealed that dry farmlands had experienced a greater relative change than paddy fields since 2000. The interspersion and juxtaposition index decreased, while the number of patches grew. This showed that landscape fragmentation was increasing and the landscape pattern was becoming dispersed. Marshlands were more stable than paddy fields and dry farmlands across all time periods, except for the year 2005.

Regional fire scenarios in Spain: Linking landscape dynamics and fire regime for wildfire risk management

Fire scenarios are multiscale land-type planning units for a fire regime with different applications at national, regional, and local scales. The main aim of this research is to implement a methodology integrating landscape dynamics and wildfire risk from a context-specific approach, to identify current fire scenarios at a regional scale in the Spanish Central Mountain Range. These homogeneous areas are linked to different stages of a territorial dynamics model called wildfire generations and related to land use diversity and land management trends. A place-based methodology has been developed to characterize fire scenarios using Geographic Information Systems and statistical analysis, resulting in analytical and diagnostic mapping that can be used as a decision support tool for spatial planning and wildfire risk management. Its implementation has led to the delimitation of 91 discrete geographic units in the Central Mountain Range, classified according to wildfire generations and land use-land cover criteria. In conclusion, the fire scenarios concept is a potential approach to manage uncertainty by moving from the operational level of fire suppression to the strategic level of integrated fire management.

Clearing shrubland and extensive livestock farming: Active prevention to control wildfires in the Mediterranean mountains

Forest fires are one of the main environmental problems in Mediterranean environments and different fire prevention policies have been applied: livestock grazing, prescribed fires and a combination of both. However, none present satisfactory results. In that context, in 1986 the Regional Government of La Rioja started the Plan for Shrub Clearing (PSC), combining shrub clearings and livestock grazing to control fires and improve the land management of abandoned mountain areas. Our study aims to analyse the effects of shrub clearings on forest fires in La Rioja and to compare the main results with those observed in Spain in the last 30 years. We apply an interdisciplinary methodology based on the analysis of the evolution of cleared areas, the evolution of wildfires in La Rioja and Spain, mapping land use and land cover changes, and quantifying the combustibility. Results obtained in La Rioja are very positive compared with the evolution of Spain, both in the reduction of the number of fires and the burned areas. Decreases in the combustible material, fuel load and biomass and in the occurrence of fires (>1 ha) were observed. In addition, clearing shrubland and extensive livestock provided other environmental benefits (i.e. mosaic landscapes, ecosystem services). Finally, this study suggested that they are good and sustainable techniques to prevent and control wildfires and they could be used as a land management strategy in other Mediterranean areas.

Land Use and Landscape Pattern Changes in the Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China

Agricultural reclamation has been the major threat to land use changes in the Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China, over the past decades. However, spatial and temporal dynamics of land use and landscape, especially in the recent years, are not well known. In this study, land use and landscape pattern changes from 1982 to 2015 were analyzed using remote sensing data by splitting the period into five periods. The results indicated that the largest reduction of forestland area was 648.70 km2 during 1995–2000, and the relative change was −1.84%. The converted area of forestlands to dry farmlands in this period was about 90% of the total reduced forestland area. Marshland areas decreased remarkably by 63.29% and paddy fields increased by 1.78 times from 1982 to 2015. Paddy fields experienced large conversion into dry farmlands during 2005–2010 (1788.57 km2), followed by a reverse conversion from 1995 to 2000 (2379.60 km2). The difference of relative change revealed development speed of paddy field was faster than that of dry farmlands among the five periods. Landscape pattern was analyzed using class- and landscape-level metrics. The landscape diversity index and number of patches increased, which showed that the degrees of the forestland, marshland, and cropland landscape fragmentation were aggravated. Our study provides the effective means of land use dynamic monitoring and evaluation at the landscape level for the existing forestlands and marshlands protection.