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A range of remote sensing platforms provide high spatial and temporal resolution insights which are useful for monitoring vegetation growth. Very few studies have focused on fruit orchards, largely due to the inherent complexity of their structure. Fruit trees are mixed with inter-rows that can be grassed or non-grassed, and there are no standard protocols for ground measurements suitable for the range of crops. The assessment of biophysical variables (BVs) for fruit orchards from optical satellites remains a significant challenge. The objectives of this study are as follows: (1) to address the challenges of extracting and better interpreting biophysical variables from optical data by proposing new ground measurements protocols tailored to various orchards with differing inter-row management practices, (2) to quantify the impact of the inter-row at the Sentinel pixel scale, and (3) to evaluate the potential of Sentinel 2 data on BVs for orchard development monitoring and the detection of key phenological stages, such as the flowering and fruit set stages. Several orchards in two pedo-climatic zones in southeast France were monitored for three years: four apricot and nectarine orchards under different management systems and nine cherry orchards with differing tree densities and inter-row surfaces. We provide the first comparison of three established ground-based methods of assessing BVs in orchards: (1) hemispherical photographs, (2) a ceptometer, and (3) the Viticanopy smartphone app. The major phenological stages, from budburst to fruit growth, were also determined by in situ annotations on the same fields monitored using Viticanopy. In parallel, Sentinel 2 images from the two study sites were processed using a Biophysical Variable Neural Network (BVNET) model to extract the main BVs, including the leaf area index (LAI), fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR), and fraction of green vegetation cover (FCOVER). The temporal dynamics of the normalised FAPAR were analysed, enabling the detection of the fruit set stage. A new aggregative model was applied to data from hemispherical photographs taken under trees and within inter-rows, enabling us to quantify the impact of the inter-row at the Sentinel 2 pixel scale. The resulting value compared to BVs computed from Sentinel 2 gave statistically significant correlations (0.57 for FCOVER and 0.45 for FAPAR, with respective RMSE values of 0.12 and 0.11). Viticanopy appears promising for assessing the PAI (plant area index) and FCOVER for orchards with grassed inter-rows, showing significant correlations with the Sentinel 2 LAI (R2 of 0.72, RMSE 0.41) and FCOVER (R2 0.66 and RMSE 0.08). Overall, our results suggest that Sentinel 2 imagery can support orchard monitoring via indicators of development and inter-row management, offering data that are useful to quantify production and enhance resource management.

Most Orchards throughout the Mediterranean basin rely heavily on irrigation, a dependency increasing due to climate changes. Assessing the water requirement (WR) is crucial and depends on different factors, including orchard age, tree density per field, inter-row management. This study proposes new methods to evaluate these characteristics with remote sensing (RS). Various remote sensors providing high and very high spatial resolution images are investigated and their accuracy is assessed. The final objective is to assess WR using variables derived from remote sensing compared to data provided by water managers and from the FAO method. A typical Mediterranean watershed was selected in South-Eastern France, with orchards having various agricultural practices. Original methods were developed with Sentinel 2 (S2) data (2016–2023), 1 Pleiades image (2022) and the extraction of Google-satellite-hybrid images (GSH, 2017), and assessed using a large ground observation dataset (information on water use collected on 366 fields). Five orchards were monitored by capacitive sensors to assess the water balance. Irrigation durations ranged from 3–300 hours/year, with decision influenced by tree density and plot age. To identify young orchards, a thresholding approach on S2 derived NDVI effectively identified young orchards achieving a 98% accuracy rate. Grassed and non-grassed orchards were mapped using two methods, with a random forest classification using three spectral bands with 72% accuracy and a supervised approach yielding 81% accuracy for GSH and 57% for Pleiades. The performance depends on the acquisition date of images. A pattern detection algorithm applied to GSH and Pleaides determined tree density, showing a high correlation (r²=0.9) with observed data. These RS derived variables allowed to compute orchard water requirements at the watershed scale, ranging from 70 to 550 mm annually depending on management practices. The proposed methods can be extrapolated to other territories and are implemented using open access softwares.

Mediterranean land systems are undergoing significant changes in terms of agricultural land use and practices. The location and nature of agricultural areas in the Mediterranean basin are changing following a set of tensions and opportunities taking place both locally and in the entire basin. This dataset presents the main short-term land system dynamics (2005–2015) and their location on the whole Mediterranean basin. The dataset is based on existing land use map and available data about agricultural surface distribution, and it is obtained through a classification process of the land systems on the two analyzed data (2005 and 2015) and a subsequent change detection between the two obtained maps. It covers all the Mediterranean bioclimatic area in pixels of 2 km spatial resolution, harmonizing information from the northern and southern side of the basin. We identified different types of changes, and the most relevant in terms of surfaces are: (1) from mixed agriculture to specialized fruit groves; (2) from agricultural areas to urban and/or periurban areas; (3) from agroforestry to arable systems, and (4) from predominantly bare soils to agricultural areas. This data can be used for further analysis to assess underlying trajectories, and the impact of the observed dynamics on biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services, as well as on the organization of the food system.

Land use changes rank among the highest threats to biodiversity, but assessment of their ecological impact is impaired by data paucity in vast regions of the world. For birds, land use changes may mean habitat loss or fragmentation, changes in resource availability, and disruption of biotic interactions or dispersal pathways. As a result, avian population sizes and assemblage diversity decline in areas subjected to urbanization, agricultural intensification, and land abandonment worldwide. This threat is especially sensitive in hotspots such as the Mediterranean basin, where avifaunas of several biogeographic origins meet, encompassing numerous endemic taxa, and ecological specialists with low resilience to habitat modifications. Here, we correlated several facets of bird taxonomic and functional diversity to a fine-grained land-use change classification, in order to identify priority areas in need for enforced protocoled bird sampling in a conservation prospect. For this, we computed the species richness, functional richness, originality and specificity of 211 bird assemblages based on bird extent-of-occurrence data for 279 species and 10 ecological traits. We used a spatialized regression model to correlate bird diversity patterns with bioclimatic gradients and land use change between 1992 and 2018, assessed from an unsupervised clustering on 2 km resolution data. We showed that species-rich bird assemblages are subjected to agricultural intensification, while functionally diverse assemblages are mainly undergoing desertification and land abandonment. Unfortunately, most of these changes occur in areas where protocoled bird surveys with sufficient spatial and temporal resolution are lacking. In light of these results, we urge for the setting of bird monitoring programs targeted mainly on parts of North-Africa and the Levant, in order to allow a region-level evaluation of the threat posed by recent land use changes on the exceptional avifaunistic diversity of the basin. Fostering such regional-scale evaluations of congruences between human threats and centers of diversity is a necessary preliminary step for a pragmatic response to data deficiencies and ultimately setting appropriate responses to avoid the collapse of avian assemblages.

Foodshed approaches allow for the assessment of the theoretical food self-sufficiency capacity of a specific region based on biophysical conditions. Recent analyses show that the focus needs to be shifted from foodshed size portrayed as an isotropic circle to a commodity–group-specific spatial configuration of the foodshed that takes into account the socio-economic and biophysical conditions essential to the development of local food supply chains. We focused on a specific animal product (beef) and used an innovative modeling approach based on spatial analysis to detect the areas of the foodshed dedicated to beef feeding (forage, pasture, and grassland), considering the foodshed as a complex of complementary areas called an archipelago. We used available statistical data including a census to address the city-region of Avignon, France covering a 100 km radius. Our results showed that the factors driving the use of short supply chains for beef feeding areas are the foodshed archipelago’s number of patches, the connectivity between them, and the rugosity of the boundaries. In addition, our beef self-sufficiency assessment results differ depending on geographical context. For instance, being located within the perimeters of a nature park seems to help orient beef production toward short supply chains. We discuss possible leverage for public action to reconnect beef production areas to consumption areas (the city) via short supply chains (e.g., green, home-grown school food programs) to increase local food security through increased local food self-sufficiency.

Mediterranean coastal territories are concerned by land and real estate markets pressures and by environmental pressures related to the touristic and residential development models. This context implies land-related conflicts. In this paper, we proposed a planning game, ALTERé, applied to two intermunicipalities of the coastal Var’s Department in order to meet two main objectives : firstly, to develop an oriented formation to train different actors of spatial planning in terms of sustainable development stakes and secondly, to analyze how an alternative scenario of planning is set up. Composed by four sequences, the game enables a space of concertation between actors with some arguing interests. The achieved results concerned identifications of strategic areas, disagreements on the territorial project and indications for public action. This approach could be generalized to other territories and to other planning scenarios.

The dataset presented in this paper is based on data gathered from several countries within the West Mediterranean area at the highest detailed scale regarding official statistics, with the aim of investigating land and food systems dynamics in the Mediterranean. Characterizing land and food systems dynamics is critical to reveal insights regarding interactions between current dynamics of agricultural practices, species diversity and local food systems. These interactions were analyzed, at multiple spatial scales, on a large part of the Mediterranean basin within the DIVERCROP Project (https://divercropblog.wordpress.com/).An harmonized dataset with the desired characteristics was not readily available from official sources and, therefore, it was necessary to build an ad hoc database that could: (1) cover the Mediterranean areas of seven countries, namely Algeria (DZ), France (FR), Italy (IT), Malta (MT), Portugal (PT), Spain (ES) and Tunisia (TN); (2) contain data referred to the most disaggregated level of administrative units for which data is available in each country; (3) contain data referred to at least two time points, including the latest available data, in each country; (4) contain data on number of farm holdings, on the physical areas covered by the main annual and permanent crops and on livestock (number of heads); (5) contain a primary key that allows joining the census and surveys database to a geographical dataset of administrative units covering the entire area; (6) have an associated complete geographical dataset of administrative units, to allow spatial data analyses. Keywords: Mediterranean farming systems, Agricultural dynamics, Land systems, Crop diversity, West mediterranean basin, Crop production

The study aims to describe and interpret the agricultural system dynamics on the Western Mediterranean areas in terms of occupied land and crop specialization, by using the available data from the two last agricultural censuses. From the spatial point of view, we chose to adopt the most detailed level available, by using the smallest land administrative unit (LAU) for every involved country (Spain, Portugal, France and Italy). The resulting database was made of about 16k records and seven fields for a total of 112k single data. The considered variables were: total farm area (TFA), utilized agricultural area (UAA), irrigated area (IA), arable lands (AL), permanent crops (PC), permanent grassland (PG) and remaining surface (RS). The LAU data analysis was carried out following the four steps: (i) level of land occupation by agricultural systems; (ii) patterns of crop groups in UAA composition; (iii) attribution to each LAU of an agricultural typology (AT), resulting from the combination of the two previous features and iv) calculation of two synthetic indices to evaluate the expansion and specialization level for each LAU. Finally, an analysis of the spatial distribution of the two indices was proposed. Results showed a lowering over time of the TFA, UAA and PG areas and an increase of IA and RS. The number of identified ATs was rising at the expense of their extension. This phenomenon led to a fragmentation in ATs spatial distribution within the same geographical region. These changes prove that farmers’ responses to the driving forces acting on agricultural systems have been more differentiated than in the past. The prevailing strategy seems to aim at a reduction in the level of specialization of the agricultural systems whereas less marked was the lowering of their level of expansion.

Farm abandonment and over-extensification trends in less-favored livestock breeding areas in the Mediterranean have led to socio-environmental issues that are difficult to assess and address, due to the characteristics of these areas (e.g., poor data availability and reliability). In a study case that presents many of the characteristics common to these areas, we combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to assess (i) the relationship between livestock production and land-cover change and (ii) the drivers of farmer decisions, concerning the types of livestock they breed. We show that the Common Agricultural Policy’s objective of open-landscape preservation cannot be achieved through the observed livestock management practices, with the most heavily CAP subsidy-dependent activities (e.g., suckler-cow breeding) having one of the weakest contributions to this objective. We also econometrically show that suckler-cow breeding is more likely to be adopted as a complementary or main activity in farms facing a labor scarcity and land abundance context. These results complement the literature and contribute to the discussion regarding the design of CAP support for less-favored Mediterranean areas.

The Mediterranean Basin is at the same time a region of stark social and ecological contrasts and a global biodiversity hotspot, where complex local evolving land use and land cover patterns compose the region’s landscapes. In this context, we aimed for a specific case study of the southeast of France, to assess land and farming systems’ dynamics, to identify their underlying drivers, and to propose possible shared future scenarios for local policies’ implementation. We based our analyses on a mixed approach and operated at downscale from territorial to local scale. First, we applied a quantitative statistical approach for the Vaucluse department. Then, we identified a subzone of the study area and pursued a local analysis through a qualitative and participative approach based on stakeholders’ knowledge. The study highlighted two main dynamics in land and farming systems that involve several changes. The first one is a process of land abandonment, strongly connected to a peri-urbanization process in some areas or to the loss of traditional farming systems in others. The second one is a process of specialization, at both territorial and farm levels, that corresponds to an intensification process and is linked to vineyards’ expansion dynamic with a landscape homogenizing effect.

Since the 1960s, research has dealt with agricultural intensification (AI) as a solution to ensure global food security. Recently, sustainable intensification (SI) has increasingly been used to describe those agricultural and farming systems that ensure adequate ecosystem service provision. Studies differ in terms of the application scales and methodologies, thus we aim to summarize the main findings from the literature on how AI and SI are assessed, from the farm to global levels. Our literature review is based on 7865 papers selected from the Web of Science database and analysed using CorText software. A further selection of 105 relevant papers was used for an in-depth full-text analysis on: i) farming systems studied; ii) related ecosystem services; iii) indicators of intensity; and iv) temporal and spatial scales of analysis. Through this two-step analysis we were able to highlight three main research gaps in the AI research indicators. Firstly, the farming systems analysed for assessing AI are often quite simplified or monoculture- oriented, and they do not take the diversity and complex organisation of farming systems into account. Secondly, these studies mainly focus on northern countries or developing countries, whereas there is a gap of knowledge in Mediterranean areas, which are the areas with a high complexity of farming systems and diversity in ecosystem services. Finally, AI is mostly assessed through nitrogen inputs and economic yield, which are used the most both at very local and global levels. Intermediate regional or local levels, which are relevant for policy implementation and local planning, are often neglected.

Soil conservation is an important issue for farming and environmental protection in Mediterranean areas. Hillside farming systems, based on winter cereals and legumes, are common in these areas and are the target of several environmental policies. Soil organic matter (SOM) is widely used to assess the environmental performance of these cropping systems. Nevertheless, few studies have considered soil conservation practices in hillside systems in terms of implementing more effective agro-environmental policies for these areas. This paper compares the SOM conservation of different winter cereal based cropping systems within Mediterranean hillside crops/livestock farms. Seventeen cropping systems were characterised by on-farm surveys in the inland hilly area of Grosseto (Tuscany, Italy). For each cropping system, we performed a SOM balance, based on Hénin-Dupuis’ equation, using either local environmental databases or data from on-farm surveys. Differences between cropping systems were analysed by the Kruskal-Wallis test. On average, the cropping systems identified did not guarantee SOM conservation and varied considerably from farm to farm, however, some practices seemed to have a positive performance, e.g. cropping systems of cattle farms. According to the literature, annual SOM balance differs significantly depending on crop rotation length and longer crop rotations performed better than shorter ones. However, we found a local effect indicating that this better performance was influenced by local farmers' cooperatives, which to some extent counteracted the negative effect of crop rotation length. There were significant differences in the performance of dairy sheep and cattle farms (-1031 kg ha-1 yr-1 vs. +103 kg ha-1 yr-1, respectively). This suggests that the presence of livestock did not have the same favourable effect on soil conservation in Mediterranean systems and that this factor should be more investigated. Surprisingly, in our sample, for the same crop rotation length, livestock density did not affect the annual SOM balance. Due to the high variability in local cropping systems and soil characteristics, further surveys on a larger sample are needed to confirm these trends. However, our results shed light on the soil conservation effects of Mediterranean hillside cropping systems of winter cereals and legumes, and could support the local implementation of agro-environmental measures.

Preserving our landscape in sustainable development processes is now widely considered as fundamental. It is a complex and evolving issue that can be tackled from several perspectives. Agronomy can contribute to analyzing the relationships between agricultural production systems (cropping, farming and agricultural systems) at different levels (field, farm, and region) and the agricultural landscape (in terms of patches, matrixes, dynamics, etc). This is of particular interest where the relationships between “what and how” are produced by agricultural activities and the landscape are changing. In this case their own reciprocity may represent an opportunity to analyze complex systems, such as the characterization of agri-landscapes at a regional level. We propose a case study developed as an up-scaling analytical process from a farm to a regional level. The result was the identification of six main agri-landscape systems highlighting the landscape drivers that are changing the traditional landscape of a rural region in Northern Tuscany (Lunigiana).