Agricultural Terraced Landscapes in the Province of Trieste (Northeastern Italy)

Effects of farming terraces on hydrological and geomorphological processes. A review

“…Spain (Gallart et al, 1994;Douglas et al, 1994;Cerdà, 1998;Lasanta et al, 2001), Italy (Brancucci and Paliaga, 2006;Mauro, 2011;Tarolli et al, 2014), Germany (Loczy, 1998), Israel (Ron, 1966;Ore and Bruins, 2012), Peru (Inbar and Llerena, 2000;Posthumus and de Graaff, 2005), México (Mountjoy and Gliessman, 1988), Nepal (Gardner and Gerrard, 2003), Yemen (Pietsch and Mabit, 2012), Indonesia (Sutikto and Chikamori, 1993), China (Quine et al, 1999;Cao et al, 2013), Kenia (Winter-Nelson and Amegbeto, 1998) and Ethiopia (Amsalu and de Graff, 2007), among others, have large areas of farmland covered by terraces. The significant number of scientific publications and the recent organisation of two international conferences (the First World Conference on Terraced Landscape, held in 2010 in China, and the second one held in 2014 in Peru) confirm the importance of terraces as an integrated system of land and natural resource management.…”

Worrying about ‘Vertical Landscapes’: Terraced Olive Groves and Ecosystem Services in Marginal Land in Central Italy

“…More recently recognized as ecological focus areas (EFAs), terraces may be preserved through direct payments or by carrying out the priorities of the last Rural Developmental Programme (2014-2020), for instance the restoration, preservation and enhancement of ecosystems related to agriculture and forestry. In this regard, identification, characterization and mapping of terraced agricultural systems is still partial in Europe [35] and terraced land or stone walls' linear segments are frequently absent from official land-use databases at both country and regional levels [36]. Aiming at sustainable rural land planning, earlier studies have contributed to identifying methodologies to map terraced farmland at a local small scale [4,22,27,37] including a catalogue of traditional land-management practices used in terracing [11].…”