[Reconstruction of changes in land uses and in landscape structure (1956-1994): Interaction with fires. Case of a pilot area in the province of Alicante] | Reconstruccion de los cambios en los usos del suelo y en la estructura del paisaje (1956-1994): Interaccion con los incendios. Caso de una zona piloto en la provincia de Alicante
1998
Duguy Pedra, B.
This study has been developed within the framework of the LUCIFER project (Land Use Interactions with Fire in Mediterranean Ecosystems). In it, we have reconstructed, using photointerpretation and a Geographical Information System, the evolution of land uses and the landscape structure in a municipality of Alicante (1956-1994), as well as its fire regime (1973-1996). The area of study was divided into two subzones that differ in their model of arable and livestock farming and fire regime. It is observed that for the study period, both landscapes have had greater heterogeneity and fragmentation, unlike the original hypothesis. In the mainly arable subzone, crop abandonment has permitted a more diverse and fragmented landscape to evolve, which seems to have become stable in recent years. In the marginal subzone, of more extensive arable and livestock farming, the staggered abandonment of crops, combined with the fire factor, generated a very varied patchwork of successive stages of vegetation, or rather they favoured a greater heterogeneity of landscape. However, the large-scale fires that occurred throughout the study period and the high recurrence of fires reached in recent years have homogenized more and more areas of this landscape. This leads us to suppose that the latter will be decreasingly diverse and less fragmented. This works points out how complex it is to study the interactions between ecological processes and spatial structure and underlines how much the result of this study depends on the time and space scales that were initially defined.
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