A new approach to quantify grazing pressure under Mediterranean pastoral systems using GIS and remote sensing
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Pastoral systems based on grazing itineraries, very common along the Mediterranean region, provides an opportunity to search feeding resources at landscape scale under a silvopastoral system called by San Miguel (2004) as “Mosaic of different land uses within one management unit”. However daily and seasonal movements of flocks bring on different Grazing Pressure (GP) over the landscape. This study presents an approach to modeling sheep GP under a Mediterranean pastoral system in Northeast of Portugal. The pressure of grazing in a given
location depends on Distance from the stable to the border of the parish, Distance to the stable, Stocking Density (SD) (sheep/ha) and preferences for land use and land cover (LULC) (Castro et al., 2004). Geoprocessing integrates several geodatabases, a) land use (COS2015), b) parishes boundaries (DGT, 2017), c) stables location (0108_OTSA_2_E), and d) Sentinel-2 data. SD was performed by Multiple Ring Buffer tool and Ordinary kriging. Homogeneous LULC units (Permanent Crops; Annual crops; Forest; Shrubland; Grassland; Waterland) were obtained by Supervised classification algorithms. The COS2015 was used to establish a mask of the urban area and ungrazed forests. The best performing preferences classifier was Randon Forest (kappa=89,3%; global accuracy=91%). Integrating the LULC grazing and the SD
(Weighted Overlay tool) allows to calculate and to map the GP (figure 1). The most common GP in grazing classes is about 4.7 sheep/ha.
Pastoral systems based on grazing itineraries, very common
along the Mediterranean region, provides an opportunity to
search feeding resources at landscape scale under a
silvopastoral system called by San Miguel (2004) as “Mosaic
of different land uses within one management unit”. However
daily and seasonal movements of flocks bring on different
Grazing Pressure (GP) over the landscape. The GP in a given
location depends on the distance from the stable to the parish
border, the distance to the stable, the heads of livestock and
their preferences for land use and land cover (LULC).
