Land use and environmental factors affecting red-legged partridge (Alectoris rufa) hunting yields in southern Spain

The red-legged partridge is a small game species widely hunted in southern Spain. Its commercial use has important socioeconomic effects in rural areas where other agrarian uses are of marginal importance. The aims of the present work were to identify areas in Andalusia (southern Spain) where game yields for the red-legged partridge reach high values and to establish the environmental and land use factors that determine them. We analysed 32,134 annual hunting reports (HRs) produced by 6,049 game estates during the hunting seasons 1993/1994 to 2001/2002 to estimate the average hunting yields of red-legged partridge in each Andalusian municipality (n=771). We modelled the favourability for obtaining good hunting yields using stepwise logistic regression on a set of climatic, topographical, land use and vegetation variables that were available as digital coverages or tabular data applied to municipalities. Good hunting yields occur mainly in plain areas located in the Guadalquivir valley, at the bottom of Betic Range and in the Betic depressions. Favourable areas are related to highly mechanised, lowelevation areas mainly dedicated to intensive dry crops. The most favourable areas predicted by our model are mainly located in the Guadalquivir valley.

Using modeling tools for implementing feasible land use and nature conservation governance systems in small islands e The Pico Island (Azores) case-study

The present study deals with the development of systematic conservation planning as management instrument in small oceanic islands, ensuring open systems of governance, and able to integrate an informed and involved participation of the stakeholders. Marxan software was used to define management areas according a set of alternative land use scenarios considering different conservation and management paradigms. Modeled conservation zones were interpreted and compared with the existing protected areas allowing more fused information for future trade-outs and stakeholder's involvement. The results, allowing the identification of Target Management Units (TMU) based on the consideration of different development scenarios proved to be consistent with a feasible development of evaluation approaches able to support sound governance systems. Moreover, the detailed geographic identification of TMU seems to be able to support participated policies towards a more sustainable management of the entire island

Estimation of water use and crop coefficients for an intensive olive orchard using sap flow measurements and modeled data

Olive tree sap flow measurements were collected in an intensive orchard near Évora, Portugal, during the irrigation seasons of 2013 and 2014, to calculate daily tree transpiration rates (T_SF). Meteorological variables were also collected to calculate reference evapotranspiration (ETo). Both data were used to assess values of basal crop coefficient (Kcb) for the period of the sap flow observations. The soil water balance model SIMDualKc was calibrated with soil, biophysical ground data and sap flow measurements collected in 2013. Validated in 2014 with collected sap flow observations, the model was used to provide estimates of dual e single crop coefficients for 2014 crop growing season. Good agreement between model simulated daily transpiration rates and those obtained with sapflow measurements was observed for 2014 (R2=0.76, RMSE=0.20 mm d-1), the year of validation, with an estimation average absolute error (AAE) of 0.20 mm d-1. Olive modeled daily actual evapotranspiration resulted in atual ETc values of 0.87, 2.05 and 0.77 mm d-1 for 2014 initial, mid- and end-season, respectively. Actual crop coefficient (Kc act) values of 0.51, 0.43 and 0.67 were also obtained for the same periods, respectively. Higher Kc values during spring (initial stage) and autumn (end-stage) were published in FAO56, varying between 0.65 for Kc ini and 0.70 for Kc end. The lower Kc mid value of 0.43 obtained for the summer (mid-season) is also inconsistent with the FAO56 expected Kc mid value of 0.70 for the period. The modeled Kc results are more consistent with the ones published by Allen & Pereira [1] for olive orchards with effective ground cover of 0.25 to 0.5, which vary between 0.40 and 0.80 for Kc ini, 0.40–0.60 for Kc mid with no active ground cover, and 0.35–0.75 for Kc end, depending on ground cover. The SIMDualKc simulation model proved to be appropriate for obtaining evapotranspiration and crop coefficient values for our intensive olive orchard in southern Portugal.

Olive water use and crop coefficients from energy balance and radiometric canopy temperatures

Biophysical and meteorological variables as well as radiometric canopy temperatures were collected in an intensive orchard near Évora, Portugal, with 28% ground cover by canopy and combined in a simplified two-source energy balance model (STSEB) to independently calculate the olive tree transpiration (T_STSEB) component of the total evapotranspiration (ETc). Sap flow observations were simultaneously taken in the same orchard allowing also for independent calculations of tree transpiration (T_SF). Model water use results were compared with water use estimates from the sap flow measurements. Good agreement was observed (R2=0.86, RMSE=0.20 mm d-1), with an estimation average absolute error (AAE) of 0.17 mm d-1. From June to August, on average olive water use were 1.92 and 1.89 mm d-1 for sap flow and STSEB model respectively, and 1.38 and 1.58 mm d-1 for the month of September. Results were also used to assess the olive basal crop coefficients (Kcb). Kcb estimates of 0.33 were obtained for sap flow and STSEB model, respectively, for June to August, and of 0.44 and 0.53 for the month of September. Basal crop coefficients were lower than the suggested FAO56 average Kcb values of 0.65 for June to August, the crop mid-season growth stage, and of 0.65 for the month of September, the end-season.

Assessment of environment, land management, and spatial variables on recent changes in montado land cover in southern Portugal

Montado decline has been reported since the end of the nineteenth century in southern Portugal and increased markedly during the 1980s. Consensual reports in the literature suggest that this decline is due to a number of factors, such as environmental constraints, forest diseases, inappropriate management, and socioeconomic issues. An assessment on the pattern of montado distribution was conducted to reveal how the extent of land management, environmental variables, and spatial factors contributed to montado area loss in southern Portugal from 1990 to 2006. A total of 14 independent variables, presumably related to montado loss, were grouped into three sets: environmental variables, land management variables, and spatial variables. From 1990 to 2006, approximately 90,054 ha disappeared in the montado area, with an estimated annual regression rate of 0.14 % year-1. Variation partitioning showed that the land management model accounted for the highest percentage of explained variance (51.8 %), followed by spatial factors (44.6 %) and environmental factors (35.5 %). These results indicate that most variance in the large-scale distribution of recent montado loss is due to land management, either alone or in combination with environmental and spatial factors. The full GAM model showed that different livestock grazing is one of the most important variables affecting montado loss. This suggests that optimum carrying capacity should decrease to 0.18–0.60 LU ha-1 for livestock grazing in montado under current ecological conditions in southern Portugal.

How can the land managers and his multi-stakeholder network at the farm level influence the multifunctional transitions pathways?

The changing role of agriculture is at the core of transition pathways in many rural areas. Productivism, post-productivism and multifunctionality have been targeted towards a possible conceptualization of the transition happening in rural areas. The factors of change, including productivist and post-productivist trends, are combined in various ways and have gone in quite diverse directions and intensities, in individual regions and localities. Even, in the same holding, productivist and post-productivist strategies can co-exist spatially, temporally, structurally, leading to a higher complexity in changing patterns. In south Portugal extensive landscapes, dominated by traditionally managed agro-forestry systems under a fuzzy land use pattern, multifunctionality at the farm level is indeed conducted by different stakeholders whose interests may or not converge: a multifunctional land management may indeed incorporate post-productivist and productivist agents. These stakeholders act under different levels of ownership, management and use, reflecting a particular land management dynamic, in which different interests may exist, from commercial production to a variety of other functions (hunting, bee-keeping, subsistence farming, etc.), influencing management at the farm level and its supposed transition trajectory. This multistakeholder dynamic is composed by the main land-manager (the one who takes the main decisions), sub land-managers (land-managers under the rules of the main land-manager), workers and users (locals or outsiders), whose interest and action within the holding may vary differently according to future (policy, market, etc.) trends, and therefore reflect more or less resilient systems. The goal of the proposed presentation is to describe the multi-stakeholder relations at the farm level, its spatial expression and the factors influencing the land management system resilience in face of the transition trends in place.

An R package for simulating metapopulation dynamics and range expansion under environmental change

The metapopulation paradigm is central in ecology and conservation biology to understand the dynamics of spatially-structured populations in fragmented landscapes. Metapopulations are often studied using simulation modelling, and there is an increasing demand of user-friendly software tools to simulate metapopulation responses to environmental change. Here we describe the MetaLandSim R package, mwhich integrates ideas from metapopulation and graph theories to simulate the dynamics of real and virtual metapopulations. The package offers tools to (i) estimate metapopulation parameters from empirical data, (ii) to predict variation in patch occupancy over time in static and dynamic landscapes, either real or virtual, and (iii) to quantify the patterns and speed of metapopulation expansion into empty landscapes. MetaLandSim thus provides detailed information on metapopulation processes, which can be easily combined with land use and climate change scenarios to predict metapopulation dynamics and range expansion for a variety of taxa and ecological systems.