Indicators in the study sites

Table of Contents

1. Compilers and contributors
2. Introduction
3. Climate indicators
4. Water indicators
5. Soil indicators
6. Vegetation indicators
7. Water runoff indicators
8. Forest fires indicators
9. Agriculture indicators
10. Cultivation indicators
11. Animal husbandry indicators
12. Land management indicators
13. Land use indicators
    1. Land abandonment
    2. Land use intensity
    3. Period of existing land use
    4. Urban area and rate of change
    5. Distance of low elevation lands from the sea shore
14. Water use indicators
15. Tourism indicators
16. Human characteristics indicators
17. Institutional indicators
18. Conclusions
19. References

Land use indicators

Types of vegetation and land use are important factors controlling various processes affecting desertification. Land use and land use intensity is related to processes of land degradation and desertification such as soil erosion, soil structure decline, loss in organic matter content, soil salinization, etc. These processes are related to human actions such as repeated destruction of vegetation on the sloping lands, reduction in organic matter content and aggregate stability of soils, improper tillage operations, and irrigation with low quality water, without satisfying the leaching requirements.

The land use type and land use evolution is a very important factor for assessing the various processes of land degradation and desertification. Changes from sustainable traditional land uses to more intensive land uses steadily puts pressure on the soil initiating or enhancing land desertification processes often resulting in land abandonment. Various driving forces such as subsidies, new cultivation techniques, and availability of infrastructures have greatly affected land uses and land use changes with great impacts on land degradation and desertification.

Crop production in many hilly areas around the Mediterranean region has drastically declined due to soil erosion and cultivation is more and more concentrated in the most promising low lands. Some of the degraded hilly areas have been abandoned from agriculture and used as grazing land... Such areas are very often deliberately burned by farmers to eradicate the existing vegetation and encourage the growth of palatable grass, and then they are overgrazed favouring high erosion rates and subjected to high desertification risk. Others are naturally transformed into forest lands reducing desertification risk.

In the last decades urban areas have been extended in productive soils located along the coast of the Mediterranean basin. The process of urbanization accompanied by the expansion of infrastructures (roads, airports, ports, etc) leads to isolation of soil acting as a natural body affecting the physical environment. Urbanization have great impacts on various degradation processes such as soil erosion, flooding of lowland, reduction of groundwater enrichment with good quality of water, water pollution, etc.

The following indicators have been considered here related to land use: (a) land abandonment, (b) land use intensity, (c) period of existing land use, (d) urban area, (e) rate of change of urban area, (f) distance from the seashore.

Table 11. Number of field sites in which indicators related to land use was defined in the filled questionnaires