Exploring land-use histories of tree-crop landscapes: a cross-site comparison in the Mediterranean Basin

Abstract

Agroforestry landscapes in the Mediterranean Basin have emerged in a co-evolution between humans and nature and provide numerous ecosystem services to society. Tree crops are iconic elements of these landscapes and have frequently been managed in a sustainable way over centuries, shaping multifunctional landscapes and local people's cultural identities. However, many Mediterranean tree-crop landscapes are undergoing substantial land-use changes, threatening important ecosystem services as a result. The overarching goal of this study is to explore common and diverging patterns of land-use change across different tree crops (oaks, chestnuts, olives) and contrasting landscapes in the Mediterranean Basin over a 200-year period. Specifically, we aim to: (1) describe the dominant land-use change processes across these three crop types using three exemplary sites per crop; and (2) identify and classify the main drivers that determine these landscapes' land change histories. We find a general acceleration of landscape dynamics and identify expansion, continuity, polarisation, intensification, abandonment and renaissance as dominant processes. Although each landscape history is contextualised, we observe a general trend from multifunctional tree-crop landscapes (expansion) towards intensification or abandonment in the last 70 years. The landscapes of the southern fringe of the Mediterranean Basin show predominant trends towards intensification, while the northern landscapes evolve towards abandonment. The driving forces identified are diverse and interrelated, comprising sets of socio-cultural, political, technical, economic and natural factors. We offer some key lessons for sustainable landscape management in highlighting the undervalued potential of tree crops, the inherent complexity of landscapes, the interdependencies of drivers and the importance of economic and socio-cultural driving forces.

Agroforestry for sustainable landscape management

“…Sustainable landscape management is being implemented via landscape-level governance platforms and partnerships throughout the world (Angelstam et al 2019), providing the mechanisms by which the SDGs can become enacted (Reed et al 2016). Hundreds of bottom-up initiatives of sustainable landscape management have been screened continent by continent in a series of publications (Carmenta et al 2020;García-Martín et al 2016;Milder et al 2014;Zanzanaini et al 2017).…”

“…The Pilot Assessment of Global Ecosystems: Agroecosystems in 2000 [a precursor to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005)] used spatial analyses to graphically illuminate overlapping uses of land for agricultural production, biodiversity conservation, and multiple other ecosystem services at a global scale (Wood et al 2000). This inspired collaborative research by the CGIAR's Future Harvest program and IUCN to document and propose strategies for managing agriculture at landscape scale to better harmonize the rapid changes in land use with biodiversity conservation goals, initially using the term "ecoagriculture" before shifting to ILM (McNeely and Scherr 2003;Scherr and McNeely 2008).…”

“…1). Interestingly, a number of articles describe comparative research that has been performed across two regional landscape corridors (Buck et al 2020); between two protected areas (Therville et al 2020); between the four tropical countries of Honduras, Indonesia, Peru, and Uganda (Zinngrebe et al 2020); across the Mediterranean Basin (Flinzberger et al 2020;Wolpert et al 2020); and across ten agroforestry landscapes and landuse systems in the European Union (Rolo et al 2020). Studies were carried out at local (n = 3), regional (n = 6), national (n = 1), and supranational scales (n = 1).…”

“…Some studies focus on very specific and localized agroforestry systems, e.g. on combined rice and sugar palm systems in Southeast Asia (Dumrongrojwatthana et al 2020); on coffee-based systems in Central America (Andreotti et al 2020); or on olive-, chestnut-, and cork oak-based tree cropping systems in the Mediterranean Basin (Wolpert et al 2020). Others include a broader range of traditional and novel, silvopastoral and silvoarable systems (e.g., Buck et al 2020;Therville et al 2020).…”

Linking food systems and landscape sustainability in the Mediterranean region

“…Experts were asked to share their visions about the future of landscape products. In most of the cases, they mentioned serious threats to the persistence of the products and the associated landscapes due to, on the one hand, the dynamics of abandonment and lack of age balance and, on the other hand, the expansion of intensive monoculture lands and the pressures of urbanisation and tourism; common trends in the Mediterranean agricultural world (Agnoletti 2014;Wolpert et al 2020). Under these circumstances, food systems that are well embedded in a distinct landscape of origin can contribute to landscape preservation and rural development (Schmitt et al 2016).…”