30 Years of protection and monitoring of a steppic rangeland undergoing desertification

Slimani, H.; Aïdoud, Ahmed; Rozé, Françoise

doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv.2009.10.015

Cited by 65 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Similar problems are reported in other areas of the Mediterranean and Africa, such as Syria (Louhaichi and Tastad 2010), Algeria (Slimani et al 2010), Ethiopia (Tschopp et al 2010), and Morocco (le Polain de Waroux and Lambin 2012), and other areas of Greece (Kizos et al 2013). These case studies offer a wide range of differing causal connections between grazing and land degradation, as well as a range of modes of interweaving between effects of grazing and other local or higher scale proximal causes of degradation.…”

Section: Rationale and Backgroundsupporting

confidence: 64%

Social Capital and Social-Ecological Resilience in the Asteroussia Mountains, Southern Crete, Greece

Kizos¹,

Detsis²,

Iosifides³

et al. 2014

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Social-ecological resilience (SER) expresses the capacity of a social-ecological system to adapt and transform. We investigated the ways in which different types and transformations of social capital influence the SER of a region. The study area, the Asteroussia Mountains in southern Crete, Greece, is a typical semiarid hilly/mountainous area of the eastern Mediterranean in which land degradation is one of the most important issues in land management, mostly related to overgrazing because of the growing size of the flocks of sheep and goats. The approach followed was qualitative, with in-depth interviews with a small number of key stakeholders in the area. The findings indicate many important changes in the area in terms of its production, economy, and society, i.e., from a "semiarid husbandry" period during the 1950s to the early 1980s, through a transition period lasting until the end of 1980s, to a new state, the "subsidized husbandry" period, abruptly terminated in 2008 by the ongoing economic crisis. These changes correspond to important changes in social capital and very low levels of wider social trust among stockbreeders, while trust toward other forms of collective action at the local/regional level is also limited. Agricultural subsidies in the 1980s and onward seemed to be an important "vehicle" for this change. Another important factor is related to external inputs and cash availability. The most serious negative impact of all these changes seems to be the abandonment of long-term care for the land. Primary producers ceased to associate their income with land quality, and this appears to be one important reason, among others, for the intensification of grazing densities and the abandonment of practices that considered vegetation and soil quality.

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Section: Rationale and Backgroundsupporting

confidence: 64%

Social Capital and Social-Ecological Resilience in the Asteroussia Mountains, Southern Crete, Greece

Kizos¹,

Detsis²,

Iosifides³

et al. 2014

E&S

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“…3.8% of the total of studies reviewed). A disproportionate number of these studies correspond to French-Algerian collaborations [137,138], which likely reflect colonial history. It is interesting to note, however, that the number of multi-continent studies has been increasing over recent years (number of multi-continent studies versus year of publication, Spearman correlation coefficient ¼ 0.77, p , 0.001), suggesting that international collaborations are gaining importance [19,139,140].…”

Section: Research Gaps and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

Maestre

Salguero‐Gómez

Quero

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

262

209

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Drylands occupy large portions of the Earth, and are a key terrestrial biome from the socio-ecological point of view. In spite of their extent and importance, the impacts of global environmental change on them remain poorly understood. In this introduction, we review some of the main expected impacts of global change in drylands, quantify research efforts on the topic, and highlight how the articles included in this theme issue contribute to fill current gaps in our knowledge. Our literature analyses identify key under-studied areas that need more research (e.g. countries such as Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Somalia, and deserts such as the Thar, Kavir and Taklamakan), and indicate that most global change research carried out to date in drylands has been done on a unidisciplinary basis. The contributions included here use a wide array of organisms (from micro-organisms to humans), spatial scales (from local to global) and topics (from plant demography to poverty alleviation) to examine key issues to the socio-ecological impacts of global change in drylands. These papers highlight the complexities and difficulties associated with the prediction of such impacts. They also identify the increased use of long-term experiments and multidisciplinary approaches as priority areas for future dryland research. Major advances in our ability to predict and understand global change impacts on drylands can be achieved by explicitly considering how the responses of individuals, populations and communities will in turn affect ecosystem services. Future research should explore linkages between these responses and their effects on water and climate, as well as the provisioning of services for human development and well-being.

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“…In recent times, such activity has intensified with semi-permanent sheds and transport of animals in lorries, increasing livestock [30]. The overall balance has been reported as widespread, mostly irreversible, degradation of grasslands and loss of productivity in the range of 20%-40% during the last few decades [27,31].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Land Degradation States and Trends in the Northwestern Maghreb Drylands, 1998–2008

et al. 2016

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Abstract:States of ecological maturity and temporal trends of drylands in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia north of 28˝N are reported for [1998][1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008]. The input data were Normalized Difference Vegetation Index databases and corresponding climate fields, at a spatial resolution of 1 km and a temporal resolution of one month. States convey opposing dynamics of human exploitation and ecological succession. They were identified synchronically for the full period by comparing each location to all other locations in the study area under equivalent aridity. Rain Use Efficiency (RUE) at two temporal scales was used to estimate proxies for biomass and turnover rate. Biomass trends were determined for every location by stepwise regression using time and aridity as predictors. This enabled human-induced degradation to be separated from simple responses to interannual climate variation. Some relevant findings include large areas of degraded land, albeit improving over time or fluctuating with climate, but rarely degrading further; smaller, but significant areas of mature and reference vegetation in most climate zones; very low overall active degradation rates throughout the area during the decade observed; biomass accumulation over time exceeding depletion in most zones; and negative feedback between land states and trends suggesting overall landscape persistence. Semiarid zones were found to be the most vulnerable. Those results can be disaggregated by country or province. The combination with existing land cover maps and national forest inventories leads to the information required by the two progress indicators associated with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification strategic objective to improve the conditions of ecosystems and with the Sustainable Development Goal Target 15.3 to achieve land degradation neutrality. Beyond that, the results are also useful as a basis for land management and restoration.

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30 Years of protection and monitoring of a steppic rangeland undergoing desertification

Cited by 65 publications

References 24 publications

Social Capital and Social-Ecological Resilience in the Asteroussia Mountains, Southern Crete, Greece

Social Capital and Social-Ecological Resilience in the Asteroussia Mountains, Southern Crete, Greece

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

Land Degradation States and Trends in the Northwestern Maghreb Drylands, 1998–2008

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