Afforestation, agricultural abandonment and intensification: Competing trajectories in semi-arid Mediterranean agro-ecosystems
An understanding of land use change and its drivers in semi-arid Mediterranean agro-ecosystems is important for informing ways to facilitate adaptation to future environmental and socioeconomic pressures. In this paper, we mapped and quantified land use changes in the semi-arid Mediterranean agro-ecosystem of Torrealvilla catchment between 1956 and 2008. Subsequently, we detected signs of landscape fragmentation and examined the relationship between land use change trajectories and a set of biophysical factors using Generalized Additive Models (GAMs).