Land use change and forest routing in a rural context: The relevance of the community-based management and planning framework

Land-use change processes present a variety of trajectories depending on local conditions, the regional context and external influences. This study is an in-depth analysis of spatial and temporal land-use change in a rural mountain area for the data period 1965–2010. It concerns a rural area with partially mountainous characteristics and a high prevalence of forest land, in which both the processes of peri-urbanisation and a common land management system involving the state and the community can be observed. Supported by a collection of five periods of image analysis (the 1965, 1974, 1983, 1995, and 2010 maps), the transformation indicators were analysed in terms of the stability grade (SG), which expresses the total proportion of the landscape that has not experienced any transition, the rate of forest transformation (FS) and artificialisation processes (AS). In the area as a whole, the spatial and temporal transitions involve a significant increase in urban areas with a discontinuous fabric, a reduction in agricultural areas, and significant routing of forest occupation with typology and pattern transition. In the common lands, the major transformations occur between forests and semi-natural areas, with a general temporal increase in broad-leaved forest and degraded forest areas and a decrease in agricultural and agro-forestry areas, showing improvements to forest land through the introduction of new species and forest maintenance reflected in smaller subdivisions of patterns of land use. The methods enabled four periods to be identified revealing a distinctive evolution in land use, in which urban consolidation is present consistently, together with rotation of the forest typology – involving forest degradation, gains from agro-forest land or sparsely vegetated areas and the appearance of burnt areas. The results highlight the importance of public policies in the dynamics of land-use change, either in the form of planning or regulatory instruments closely linked to local communities and based on agriculture and forest resources. The management of common land, even in an informal way, introduces differences to land-use trajectories and forest maintenance and greater benefits for the communities.