Function of Agricultural Terraces in Mediterranean Conditions - Selected Examples From the Island of Ikaria (The Southern Sporades, Greece)

Tsermegas, Irena; Dłużewski, Maciej; Biejat, Katarzyna; Szynkiewicz, Adam

doi:10.2478/v10288-012-0003-8

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…There have been a number of geoarchaeological and landscape archaeology studies of terraced landscapes, such as on Antikythera (Bevan & Conolly, 2011;Bevan, Conolly, & Tsaravopoulos, 2008), the Kythera Island Project (Krahtopoulou & Frederick, 2008), on the island of Ikaria (Tsermegas, Dłużewski, & Biejat, 2011), at Markiani, Amorgos, in Greece (French & Whitelaw, 1999), and in the American Southwest (Sullivan, 2000). These show multiple phases of terrace use and construction, suggesting variable effects on soil erosion, and in the case of the American Southwest, at least sociopolitical rather than ecological reasons for terrace abandonment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Societal stability and environmental change: Examining the archaeology‐soil erosion paradox

Brown

Walsh

2016

Geoarchaeology

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This paper critically examines the soil exhaustion and societal collapse hypothesis both theoretically and empirically. The persistence of civilizations, especially in the Mediterranean, despite intensive and presumably erosive arable farming creates what is described here as the archaeology soil erosion paradox. This paper examines the data used to estimate past erosion and weathering rates before presenting case studies that engage with the theoretical arguments. Study 1 shows 5000 years of high slope erosion rates with both soil use and agriculture continuously maintained in the catchment. Study 2 shows how ancient agricultural terraces were constructed as part of an integrated agricultural system that fed the ancient city of Stymphalos—now abandoned. Study 3 presents a recent example of how after the removal of terraces high soil erosion rates result during intense rainstorms but that arable agriculture can still be maintained while external costs are borne by other parties. What these case studies have in common is the creation of soil, and increased weathering rates while productivity is maintained due to a combination of soft bedrock and/or agricultural terraces. In societal terms this may not be sustainable but it does not necessarily lead to land abandonment or societal collapse.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Societal stability and environmental change: Examining the archaeology‐soil erosion paradox

Brown

Walsh

2016

Geoarchaeology

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“…Therefore, the literature regarding terrace damages was mostly conducted at the slope scale [41,46]. Factors that could affect the damage distribution of terraces include the abandonment age, vegetation cover, and topography of slopes where terraces are located [9,40,41].…”

Section: Spatial Distribution Of Terrace Damagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Due to the presence of extremely complex and broken terrains, manual investigation alone is time-consuming, laborious, and dangerous. Moreover, terrace damage is a complex problem because it is influenced by slope gradients and heights of terrace steps, vegetation cover, and time of abandonment [9,40,41]. The efficient and accurate (semi-)automatic exploration of micro-topographical features and corresponding spatial distributions of loess terrace damages is an essential task in understanding the dynamics and trend of terrace degradation and the protection of terraced lands for sustainable ecological services.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

OBIA-Based Extraction of Artificial Terrace Damages in the Loess Plateau of China from UAV Photogrammetry

Fang

Zhu

et al. 2021

IJGI

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Terraces, which are typical artificial landforms found around world, are of great importance for agricultural production and soil and water conservation. However, due to the lack of maintenance, terrace damages often occur and affect the local flow process, which will influence soil erosion. Automatic high-accuracy mapping of terrace damages is the basis of monitoring and related studies. Researchers have achieved artificial terrace damage mapping mainly via manual field investigation, but an automatic method is still lacking. In this study, given the success of high-resolution unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry and object-based image analysis (OBIA) for image processing tasks, an integrated framework based on OBIA and UAV photogrammetry is proposed for terrace damage mapping. The Pujiawa terrace in the Loess Plateau of China was selected as the study area. Firstly, the segmentation process was optimised by considering the spectral features and the terrains and corresponding textures obtained from high-resolution images and digital surface models. The feature selection was implemented via correlation analysis, and the optimised segmentation parameter was achieved using the estimation of scale parameter algorithm. Then, a supervised k-nearest neighbourhood classifier was used to identify the terrace damages in the segmented objects, and additional geometric features at the object level were considered for classification. The comparison with the ground truth, as delineated by the image and field survey, showed that proposed classification can be adequately performed. The F-measures of extraction on three terrace damages were 92.07% (terrace sinkhole), 81.95% (ridge sinkhole), and 85.17% (collapse), and the Kappa coefficient was 85.34%. Finally, the potential application and spatial distribution of the terrace damages in this study were determined. We believe that this work can provide a credible framework for mapping terrace damages in the Loess Plateau of China.

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“…The rate of erosion on terraced slopes is highly influenced by how their profile has been changed in comparison to the natural state. The forms for which construction involved the presence of solid rock outcrops and those where terrace walls were constructed on outcrops are especially durable (Tsermegas et al 2011).…”

Section: Human-induced Geomorphological Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anthropogenic transformation of the relief of the Aegean Islands

Tsermegas

2015

Miscellanea Geographica

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The purpose of this article is to present the role of human impact in the forming and transformation of the relief of the Aegean Islands. The most significant changes (with a displacement of more than 10 bln m3 of rock material) are related to the creation of road infrastructure and the construction of agricultural terraces. In order to create stone buildings, 20 mln m3 of rock material was used; for the purposes of air transport a surface area of nearly 2.5 km2 was levelled; many kilometres of artificial shorelines were created and at least 4.5 mln m3 of material was displaced for the purposes of the construction of artificial reservoirs of a total capacity of more than 25 mln m3. A huge amount of material was removed as a result of mining activities. The indirect impact of economic activities on the relief of the discussed area includes mainly slope, fluvial and coastal processes.

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Function of Agricultural Terraces in Mediterranean Conditions - Selected Examples From the Island of Ikaria (The Southern Sporades, Greece)

Cited by 7 publications

References 13 publications

Societal stability and environmental change: Examining the archaeology‐soil erosion paradox

Societal stability and environmental change: Examining the archaeology‐soil erosion paradox

OBIA-Based Extraction of Artificial Terrace Damages in the Loess Plateau of China from UAV Photogrammetry

Anthropogenic transformation of the relief of the Aegean Islands

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