Long‐term impacts of grazing management on land degradation in a rural community of Southern Italy: Depopulation matters

Abstract

Depopulation and economic marginalization of rural districts have induced a progressive land abandonment in agricultural and pastoral districts. In Europe, areas at higher risk of farmland abandonment are characterized by low-intensity pasture systems whose fate is strongly dependent on state incentives or subsidies to rural development promoting more sustainable land-use trajectories. Especially in Southern Europe, undergrazing is the main driver of pasture degradation. In such a context, a land management preserving pasture resilience requires a wider knowledge about the impact of practices on the ecological characteristics of pastures and an improved understanding of complex socio-environmental interactions underlying the adoption of such practices. Based on these premises, this study investigates the extent to which the past land management reflects the current state of agro-pastoral systems in a local community of Southern Apennine (Basilicata, Italy). Based on a multi-scale analysis integrating multiple sources of data and exploratory techniques, three land-use trajectories with different implications for land degradation were identified: (a) areas completely abandoned, (b) areas with a decrease in grazing where the management system is remained unchanged, and (c) areas characterized by a decrease in grazing with changes in the management system. Results outline the importance of landscape history shaping (optimal and sub-optimal) land management and the influence of landscape structure on livestock performances within different farm management types.

Multiple trajectories of grassland fragmentation, degradation, and recovery in Russia's steppes

“…Such findings align with neighbouring Kazakhstan, suggesting declining human pressure while leaving behind the decaying infrastructure (Baumann et al, 2020;Dara et al, 2020). Despite ongoing urbanization, rural hollowing is also globally widespread, for instance, in Europe (Gonz alez Ioffe et al, 2004;Quaranta et al, 2020;Westhoek et al, 2006); Northern, Central, and Southern Asia (Chaudhary et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2010;Minaei et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2016); and in the United States (Holcomb et al, 2020;USDA ERS, 2017). The abandonment of croplands can be preceded by or go hand-in-hand with the decay of rural infrastructure (Holcomb et al, 2020).…”

“…development (Carbutt et al, 2017;Klein Goldewijk et al, 2011;Prishchepov et al, 2020, p. 202;Quaranta et al, 2020;Ramankutty & Foley, 1999). Sequentially, the contraction of grasslands resulted in dramatic soil organic carbon release and changes in global biogeochemical cycling (Kurganova et al, 2015;Lal, 2004), influenced ecosystem functioning (Horion et al, 2016) and negatively impacted biodiversity (Carbutt et al, 2017;Habel et al, 2013;Munteanu et al, 2020).…”

Integrating Remote-Sensed and Historical Geodata to Assess Interactions Between Rural Buildings and Agroforestry Land

“…This shows that, in addition to the loss of agricultural activity and the cultivation of cereals, all those agricultural activities linked to free grazing have been reduced over the years. This last process is much more evident in the Case PTG case study because the rural heritage was mainly realized for grazing purposes and, therefore, the abandonment of this form of agricultural activity (Quaranta et al, 2020) has led to much more intense and rapid transformations than Case VUL. In fact, while in 1955 the area surrounding the farm buildings was largely occupied by cultivated land, in 2017 the forest became the main element of the territory.…”

Exploring the Use of Sentinel-2 Data to Monitor Heterogeneous Effects of Contextual Drought and Heatwaves on Mediterranean Forests

“…Diffuse cloudiness in the study areas limited the availability of images in the corresponding dates for all the three years. Satellite image processing was fundamentally based on the analysis of the NDVI, which is a proxy for plant photosynthetic activity [57,58] and a valuable tool at different spatial scales for the Mediterranean ecosystems investigated [53,[59][60][61]. Several studies have established the efficiency of the NDVI as an indicator for anomalies associated with climatic changes [39,62,63].…”