Browsing by Subject "similarity analysis"

Over the last century, Europe has suffered intense land degradation due to unsustainable management practices and/or agricultural methods, as well as land-use change. Soil erosion and soil organic carbon (SOC) loss are two important consequences of ecosystem degradation. Agroforestry has shown great potential in rehabilitation of degraded ecosystems while providing a wide range of goods and services. However, the lack of information about the feasible distribution of traditional agroforestry systems outside its current range makes it difficult for land planers and policy makers to take action. For this reason, the objective of this research was to determine where a traditional agroforestry system such as dehesa could be implemented under favorable biophysical conditions within Europe, and where this area overlapped with environmental risk zones. The reference values were extracted from an agroforestry dehesa landscape in Trujillo (Extremadura, Spain), selected within the context of the AGFORWARD project. A similarity evaluation using GIS techniques and the Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) method Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) was undertaken to analyze the data. The area with similarity index (SI) equal or greater than 70% to the reference location (moderately and highly suitable land for dehesas) occupied over 297,786 km2, or 6.1% of the study area, across eight different countries. Moreover, in six of them, dehesas could potentially mitigate soil erosion and/or soil organic carbon loss over 103,842 km2, equivalent to 2.1% of the study area. The dehesa AFS has potential to be expanded within the Mediterranean biogeographic region, among others, countries like Spain, Italy and Greece.