scholarly journals The Iberian Peninsula’s Burning Heart—Long-Term Fire History in the Toledo Mountains (Central Spain)

Fire ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Luelmo-Lautenschlaeger ◽  
Blarquez ◽  
Pérez-Díaz ◽  
Morales-Molino ◽  
López-Sáez
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Fire Regimes ◽  
Nature Management ◽  
Central Spain ◽  
Fire Activity ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
In Fire ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin

Long-term fire ecology can help to better understand the major role played by fire in driving vegetation composition and structure over decadal to millennial timescales, along with climate change and human agency, especially in fire-prone areas such as the Mediterranean basin. Investigating past ecosystem dynamics in response to changing fire activity, climate, and land use, and how these landscape drivers interact in the long-term is needed for efficient nature management, protection, and restoration. The Toledo Mountains of central Spain are a mid-elevation mountain complex with scarce current anthropic intervention located on the westernmost edge of the Mediterranean basin. These features provide a perfect setting to study patterns of late Holocene fire activity and landscape transformation. Here, we have combined macroscopic charcoal analysis with palynological data in three peat sequences (El Perro, Brezoso, and Viñuelas mires) to reconstruct fire regimes during recent millennia and their linkages to changes in vegetation, land use, and climatic conditions. During a first phase (5000–3000 cal. BP) characterized by mixed oak woodlands and low anthropogenic impact, climate exerted an evident influence over fire regimes. Later, the data show two phases of increasing human influence dated at 3000–500 cal. BP and 500 cal. BP–present, which translated into significant changes in fire regimes increasingly driven by human activity. These results contribute to prove how fire regimes have changed along with human societies, being more related to land use and less dependent on climatic cycles.

Are wildfires a disaster in the Mediterranean basin? - A review

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 713 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juli G. Pausas ◽  
Joan Llovet ◽  
Anselm Rodrigo ◽  
Ramon Vallejo
Keyword(s):  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Fire Severity ◽  
Fire Regimes ◽  
Mediterranean Ecosystems ◽  
Human Disturbances ◽  
Erosion Rates ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Soil Losses ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin

Evolutionary and paleoecological studies suggest that fires are natural in the Mediterranean basin. However, the important increase in the number of fires and area burned during the 20th century has created the perception that fires are disasters. In the present paper, we review to what extent fires are generating ecological disasters in the Mediterranean basin, in view of current fire regimes and the long-term human pressure on the landscapes. Specifically, we review studies on post-fire plant regeneration and soil losses. The review suggests that although many Mediterranean ecosystems are highly resilient to fire (shrublands and oak forest), some are fire-sensitive (e.g. pine woodlands). Observed erosion rates are, in some cases, relatively high, especially in high fire severity conditions. The sensitive ecosystems (in the sense of showing strong post-fire vegetation changes and soil losses) are mostly of human origin (e.g. extensive pine plantations in old fields). Thus, although many Mediterranean basin plants have traits to cope with fire, a large number of the ecosystems currently found in this region are strongly altered, and may suffer disasters. Post-fire disasters are not the rule, but they may be important under conditions of previous human disturbances.

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

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 1267-1283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Wolpert ◽  
Cristina Quintas-Soriano ◽  
Tobias Plieninger
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Tree Crop ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Cross Site

scholarly journals Evidence for long‐term prevalence of cucumber vein yellowing virus in Sudan and genetic variation of the virus in Sudan and the Mediterranean Basin

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (7) ◽  
pp. 1268-1275 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Desbiez ◽  
P. Caciagli ◽  
C. Wipf‐Scheibel ◽  
P. Millot ◽  
L. Ruiz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Variation ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Yellowing Virus

scholarly journals Long-Term Yields of Switchgrass, Giant Reed, and Miscanthus in the Mediterranean Basin

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1492-1499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efthymia Alexopoulou ◽  
Federica Zanetti ◽  
Danilo Scordia ◽  
Walter Zegada-Lizarazu ◽  
Myrsini Christou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Giant Reed ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin

scholarly journals Land Use Changes Threaten Bird Taxonomic and Functional Diversity Across the Mediterranean Basin: A Spatial Analysis to Prioritize Monitoring for Conservation

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Fusco ◽  
Emily Walker ◽  
Julien Papaïx ◽  
Marta Debolini ◽  
Alberte Bondeau ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Use Change ◽  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Agricultural Intensification ◽  
Land Use Changes ◽  
Land Abandonment ◽  
Bird Assemblages ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin

Land use changes rank among the highest threats to biodiversity, but assessment of their ecological impact is impaired by data paucity in vast regions of the world. For birds, land use changes may mean habitat loss or fragmentation, changes in resource availability, and disruption of biotic interactions or dispersal pathways. As a result, avian population sizes and assemblage diversity decline in areas subjected to urbanization, agricultural intensification, and land abandonment worldwide. This threat is especially sensitive in hotspots such as the Mediterranean basin, where avifaunas of several biogeographic origins meet, encompassing numerous endemic taxa, and ecological specialists with low resilience to habitat modifications. Here, we correlated several facets of bird taxonomic and functional diversity to a fine-grained land-use change classification, in order to identify priority areas in need for enforced protocoled bird sampling in a conservation prospect. For this, we computed the species richness, functional richness, originality and specificity of 211 bird assemblages based on bird extent-of-occurrence data for 279 species and 10 ecological traits. We used a spatialized regression model to correlate bird diversity patterns with bioclimatic gradients and land use change between 1992 and 2018, assessed from an unsupervised clustering on 2 km resolution data. We showed that species-rich bird assemblages are subjected to agricultural intensification, while functionally diverse assemblages are mainly undergoing desertification and land abandonment. Unfortunately, most of these changes occur in areas where protocoled bird surveys with sufficient spatial and temporal resolution are lacking. In light of these results, we urge for the setting of bird monitoring programs targeted mainly on parts of North-Africa and the Levant, in order to allow a region-level evaluation of the threat posed by recent land use changes on the exceptional avifaunistic diversity of the basin. Fostering such regional-scale evaluations of congruences between human threats and centers of diversity is a necessary preliminary step for a pragmatic response to data deficiencies and ultimately setting appropriate responses to avoid the collapse of avian assemblages.

Land Degradation

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Thornes
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Water Resources ◽  
Land Use Change ◽  
Land Degradation ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Economic Productivity ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Erosion Mechanisms ◽  
Main Components ◽  
The Mediterranean Basin

‘Land degradation’ means the reduction and loss of the biological or economic productivity caused by land use change or by a physical process or a combination of the two. ‘Land’ means the terrestrial bio-productive system that comprises soil, vegetation, and other biota and the ecological and hydrological processes that operate within the system (UNEP 1992). The main components of land degradation are ecological degradation, soil loss, and reduction in the amount and quality of the available water resources for human survival and economic sustainability. Conacher and Sala (1998) have edited a major volume on land degradation in Mediterranean environments of the world and soil erosion mechanisms and water resources are considered in other chapters of this book (Chapters 6 and 21). This chapter will focus on the ecological aspects of land degradation by exploring some of the interactions between land use change, vegetation dynamics, grazing patterns, and wildfires. This chapter will also try to identify and avoid repeating the myths that abound in the more popular and/or politically motivated accounts of Mediterranean land degradation. Because of the complex spatial mosaic of environmental and cultural conditions across the Mediterranean (see Blondel 2006), it is not simple to identify the causes or main controls of land degradation or the management strategies required to combat degradation (Lesschen et al. 2007; Märker et al. 2008). As discussed in the context of lake sediment records in Chapter 9, it is certain that the origins of land degradation extend far back into prehistory. Indeed, Naveh and Dan (1973) have proposed a seven-phase history of land degradation for the Mediterranean basin, paraphrased thus: Phase 1 was the Lower Palaeolithic (around 1,000,000 to 100,000 years BP), when the Levant was the main route of biotic and hominid dispersal from Africa to Eurasia and later westwards through the Mediterranean basin. Hunting and gathering were the main activities and the populations were probably very low. Human impact on the environment is not known—but land degradation is assumed to have been negligible. After this, in Phase 2, it is argued that the use of fire as a tool for the opening up of dense forest spread westwards from Greece, possibly reaching France as early as 400,000 BP.

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