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

Abstract

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.

A Step towards a Sustainable Tourism in Apennine Mountain Areas: A Proposal of Geoitinerary across the Matese Mountains (Central-Southern Italy)

“…The present study deals with the enhancement of the geoheritage of the Matese Mountains, one of the most suggestive and integral mountain areas of southern Italy. This mountain area largely shares the hardships and limitations that widespread characterize other mountain regions and, in general, inner areas, such as land abandonment [3], population decrease [72], marginality, limits in mobility and inaccessibility [1,6].…”

“…At the same time, Mediterranean mountain areas are largely part of the so-called inner areas, i.e., rural areas that experience marginalization due to their geographical and socio-economic conditions ( [1,2] and references therein), and are significantly affected by demographic decline and population ageing, as well as landscape degradation caused primarily by agricultural abandonment ( [3] and references therein).…”

Classification of Mediterranean hedgerows: A methodological approximation

“…2 y 3) we digitized in shape file format the areas considered to constitute hedgerow networks and urban land at the present time and in 1956. For this, images info was interpreted considering technical features [6] , [7] , [8] , interface urban-rural in the mediterranean mountains [9] , [10] , [11] , [12] , [13] , [14] , [15] and landscape patterns in Spain [16] , [17] , [18] . This information was photointerpreted at a scale of 1:5000 considering any possible modifications or rectifications of the existing information or any incorporation of new polygons.…”

Welcoming Wolves? Governing the Return of Large Carnivores in Traditional Pastoral Landscapes

“…Rather than being prescriptive and retrograde, "custody of the territory" and ex-ante schemes enable stakeholders to seek inspiration from traditional knowledge and practices, while retaining flexibility to adapt to current societal, technological, and land-use trajectories (Fuentes et al, 2011;Persson et al, 2015). When realized under the banner of coexistence, the projects could render large carnivores a positive force for change in traditional landscapes, where the loss of biological and cultural diversity often share drivers, e.g., wildfires or ungulate overpopulation (Henle et al, 2008;Pretty et al, 2010;Varga, 2020). Gaining local legitimacy for compensation performance schemes would benefit greatly from the presence of positive demonstration places and projects, which illustrate that functioning HCR's are possible.…”