Agricultural Land-Use Changes and Soil Quality: Evaluating Long-Term Trends in a Rural Mediterranean Region

Land-Use Changes (LUCs) are the result of interacting environmental and socioeconomic factors. Although in southern Europe traditional agroforestry systems are an important component of the Mediterranean landscape, intensification and simplification of the rural space coupled with the increasing sensitivity to soil degradation are potentially harmful for the integrity of natural resources and biodiversity stock. The present study introduced a quantitative assessment of rural LUCs that occurred in a region devoted to agriculture and experiencing a progressively higher human impact from both urbanization and land abandonment. The assessment was carried out at the municipality scale along forty years (1970–2010) using data collected every ten years in the framework of the National Census of Agriculture. The Maximum potential Water Capacity (MWC) in the soil, taken as a proxy for agricultural soil quality, and an index of crop intensity have been introduced in the analysis as supplementary variables. A Multiway Factor Analysis (MFA) was developed to evaluate stability or dynamics in the investigated land-use classes. Results illustrate relevant changes in the rural landscape by identifying the classes “moving” towards better soils. An integrated evaluation of rural LUCs and soil resources based on long-time inventories available at an adequate spatial scale is a tool informing policies against soil degradation. 1. Introduction Landscapes are characterised by specific structures (i.e., the spatial arrangement of landscape elements), ecological functions (i.e., how ecological processes operate within that structure), and change dynamics (e.g., disturbance and recovery). Landscape patterns result from physical, biological, and cultural processes acting simultaneously over broad regions [1]. Climate, geology, topography, human disturbance, and land use all influence the composition, configuration, and spatial relationships of landscape elements [2]. Understanding and predicting land-use dynamics was a challenging aspect of landscape ecology since more than twenty years [3]. In Mediterranean Europe, agroforestry systems are important components of the landscape. Anthropogenic pressures and climatic changes are regarded as key factors affecting biodiversity and determining the decline of environmental quality and considerable losses in soil resources (see [4] and the references therein). Rural systems have been evolving in apparently opposite directions in the last fifty years with (i) intensification and simplification of the productions coupled with the