Using a landscape scale to approach resources management and farm functions: the case of vanishing wooded structures and small ruminants itinerancy over the agrarian matrix
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abstract
The agrarian policy of national governments and EU, practiced for decades, was part of a growthoriented
industrialization and economic policy. This had lead, among other things, to the loss of
diversified rural landscapes, which had developed in the course of history; sites and utilization, both in
area and time, tend to be standardized. As a consequence, not only habitats had been lost, which is
documented by an increasing number of wildlife species threatened by extinction, but also a
considerable number of domestic animal and plant species have become misplaced of their natural
context, in despite of some of them have been artificially maintained last decade by compensatory issues
of new “environment oriented” CAP.
Authors look upon two examples of threatened landscape process in three rural communities of Trás-os-
Montes: (1) the vanishing punctual, linear and spatial wooded structures of agricultural matrix, and (2)
the flocks’ itinerancy of native sheep and goats. In the first case, the reduction in punctual (since 1950
by -50 percent) and linear (since 1950 by -75 percent) wooded structures, as a result of functional lack
such as fencing, animal forage, summer sheltering, handcraft tools, etc could have consequences in
many landscape ecological process (soil loss, hydrological disturbance, seed bank removal,
fragmentation, etc.). In the second case, new perennial plantations of olives and chestnuts, resulting in
several constraints to animals’ circuits and forage resources availability, have disrupted traditional cereal
open fields and spatial rotation. Implications for relationships of process on patterns in landscape
dynamics, and incoherent consequences of financial support of some productions are discussed. The
landscape scale has allowed the identification of some conflicts among environmental CAP issues for
specific natural resources protection and the landscape functions in the farming system.
The diversity depletion of traditional rural landscapes could be the major
threat of a required new multifunctional rural landscape, as a consequence
of the European and National agrarian policies. The increasing
compactness of woodland and agricultural matrixes has been particularly
promoted by the loss of local regulation (population and farming abandon),
and production intensification of nearest and most fertile soils and thrust
aside of the others. Last six years, the heterogeneity of landscape interface
between the woodland and agricultural matrixes was investigated in three
rural communities of Trás-os-Montes concerning two threatened landscape
process: (1) the vanishing punctual, linear and spatial wooded structures of
agricultural matrix (scattered trees, hedgerows and fences, and woodlots)
and (2) the flocks’ itinerancy of native sheep and goats.
