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The latest world atlas of desertification represents a turning point in the diagnosis of desertification. While it forgoes desertification mapping due to the intrinsic complexity of the phenomenon and the impossibility of measuring it using a single indicator, it introduces the convergence of evidence paradigm, which identifies socioeconomic and biophysical variables whose behaviour allows pointing out those areas prone to desertification. The Spanish National Action Program Against Desertification (PAND), back in 2008, already implemented a similar approach to identify five “desertification landscapes” within Spain using both socio-economic and climatic information. The PAND was not only pioneering but also, unfortunately, accurate. Desertification in Spain has continued to worsen and the first two decades of the 21st century have consolidated an agri-food model whose dynamics have exacerbated the desertification processes identified in the PAND. Despite its scientific value, the PAND lacked a proper action plan and was completely detached from the diagnosis. As a result, the diagnosis it provided was not followed by effective actions to halt desertification in Spain. The Spanish government’s recent declaration of climate and environmental emergency requires a new strategy to combat desertification. This commitment is an excellent opportunity to update the diagnosis of the situation and, more crucially, to unify the different desertification sectoral policies and actions under a single front. We provide here elements (e.g., analysis of agri-food trends and integration of plans and policies at different geographical and sectoral levels) for a roadmap to be designed around the pressures, impacts, and drivers that define today’s Spanish desertification landscapes to effectively manage and avoid their further degradation.

We explored the relative importance of climate oscillations and human-driven disturbances on the change in vegetation biomass in agroecosystems, and whether it is associated with land use. Our main contribution is a quantitative treatment of these factors in equivalent terms, i.e. not assuming any of them to be principal. The study was carried out in the drylands of the Iberian Peninsula, NW Maghreb, Palestinian West Bank, Mozambique, China and NE Brazil, using satellite time-series and the corresponding climate fields, at ten-year observation periods with spatial and temporal resolutions of 1000 m (250 m in Palestine) and one year, respectively. For each region, we separated the relative weights of climate and time by fitting multiple-stepwise regressions to a vegetation index as the dependent variable, and annual aridity (Aridity) and year number (Time) as predictors. The relative strength of the resulting standard partial regression coefficients was then compared by the Wilcoxon signed ranks test, and their combined associations with land uses were determined using Chi-square tests. Some points of convergence are as follows: (1) The relative weights of Aridity and Time depend on particular regional conditions and can be determined. (2) Such weights are associated with land use intensification, such that if vegetation increases over Time, Aridity increases its relative importance with intensification; if vegetation is degrading, Aridity is always more important than Time. (3) Aridity is an indicator of vulnerability to climate warming. Resilience can be improved by reducing land use intensification. 4. Vulnerability may worsen under constant climate if agriculture is intensified. These patterns enhance an integrated understanding of Sustainable Development Goals Indicator 15.3.1, particularly its land cover and productivity trend components.

Natural landscapes are spatial-temporal ensembles of landforms and species in interaction with their physical environment. Ecosystems are simply their arbitrary, yet coherent subsets, where the individual components are grouped into functional compartments linked by energy and matter transfer and species interaction. Ecosystems can only persist through a cascade of energy, from higher levels (e.g., solar radiation) to heat, where multiple forms of work can be performed, and without any further work, can only dissipate. Because ecosystems must increase their organization to prevent such an inexorable flow towards degradation and disorder, we say that they can only exist far from equilibrium.

Op het Spaanse en Portugese vasteland kreunden de boeren en hun gewassen deze zomer nog meer onder de droogte dan bij ons. Is waterintensieve landbouw in deze tijden nog te verantwoorden? MO* sprak met de Spaanse landschapsecoloog Gabriel del Barrio en de Portugese klimatoloog João Santos. ‘Zolang Europese consumenten tomaten buiten het seizoen willen, zal er een mediterraanse boer zijn die ze wil produceren

Los objetivos concretos de este trabajo son: 1) Definir un procedimiento geomático para la clasificación jerárquica del clima en grandes territorios, con los siguientes requisitos: usar bases de datos normalizadas, abiertas y gratuitas como datos de entrada; usar métodos de clasificación objetivos, explícitos y repetibles; separar claramente el proceso de cómputo de la intervención de expertos en la producción del resultado final; y facilitar su repetición en la misma área de estudio para diferentes periodos, o su aplicación a nuevas áreas de estudio, por parte de personal no necesariamente experto en el área o periodo. 2) Aplicar dicho procedimiento a un área suficientemente grande del estado español, de modo que sirva como demostración metodológica y como base técnica para las tareas del sistema de seguimiento relacionadas con ecosistemas terrestres zonales.

The stabling of livestock farming implies changes in both local ecosystems (regeneration of forest stands via reduced grazing) and those located thousands of kilometers away (deforestation to produce grain for feeding livestock). Despite their importance, these externalities are poorly known. Here we evaluated how the intensification and confinement of livestock in Spain has affected forest surface changes there and in South America, the largest provider of soybeans for animal feed to the European Union. For this purpose, we have used Spanish soybean import data from Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina and a land condition map of Spain. The area of secondary forest in Spain that has regenerated as a result of livestock stabling has been ~7000 kha for the decade 2000–2010. In the same period, 1220 kha of high value South American ecosystems (e.g., Chaco dry Forest, Amazonian rainforest or Cerrado) have been deforested. While these figures may offer a favorable interpretation of the current industrial livestock production, it is not possible to speak of compensation when comparing the destruction of well-structured ecosystems, such as primary South American forests, with the creation of secondary forest landscapes in Spain, which are also prone to wildfires. Our results highlight how evaluating land use change policies at a national or regional level is an incomplete exercise in our highly telecoupled and globalized world.

Este trabajo describe los procedimientos necesarios para establecer los componentes de estado y tendencias de un ecosistema para el parámetro ‘Estructura y función’ de la Matriz General de Evaluación del estado de conservación de los tipos de hábitat de interés comunitario (THIC; DG Environment 20171; European Commission 20112), para los informes sexenales de aplicación de la Directiva Hábitats3. Ello incluye la fuente de datos principal y el Mapa de la Condición de la Tierra en España, producido por métodos geomáticos. El apartado tercero establece los sistemas de referencia y otras convenciones espaciales usadas en el estudio. Finalmente, en el apartado cuarto se desarrolla un caso práctico para 25 tipos de hábitat de bosque.

Este informe presenta dos aproximaciones complementarias para hacer operativo el concepto de fragmentación en la observación y seguimiento de los tipos de hábitat de bosque y matorral. La fragmentación es normalmente un tema elusivo en el que se han realizado progresos importantes desde el punto de vista académico, pero todavía carente de implementaciones formales que permitan su aplicación práctica en la gestión territorial. Este trabajo dedica una extensión importante a examinar este problema, y tras ello expone dos medidas de fragmentación complementarias que pueden ayudar a calcular los parámetros de la Matriz General de Evaluación del estado de conservación de los tipos de hábitat de interés comunitario (THIC; DG Environment 2017).

States of ecological maturity and temporal trends of drylands in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia north of 28°N are reported for 1998–2008. The input data were Normalized Difference Vegetation Index databases and corresponding climate fields, at a spatial resolution of 1 km and a temporal resolution of one month. States convey opposing dynamics of human exploitation and ecological succession. They were identified synchronically for the full period by comparing each location to all other locations in the study area under equivalent aridity. Rain Use Efficiency (RUE) at two temporal scales was used to estimate proxies for biomass and turnover rate. Biomass trends were determined for every location by stepwise regression using time and aridity as predictors. This enabled human-induced degradation to be separated from simple responses to interannual climate variation. Some relevant findings include large areas of degraded land, albeit improving over time or fluctuating with climate, but rarely degrading further; smaller, but significant areas of mature and reference vegetation in most climate zones; very low overall active degradation rates throughout the area during the decade observed; biomass accumulation over time exceeding depletion in most zones; and negative feedback between land states and trends suggesting overall landscape persistence. Semiarid zones were found to be the most vulnerable. Those results can be disaggregated by country or province. The combination with existing land cover maps and national forest inventories leads to the information required by the two progress indicators associated with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification strategic objective to improve the conditions of ecosystems and with the Sustainable Development Goal Target 15.3 to achieve land degradation neutrality. Beyond that, the results are also useful as a basis for land management and restoration.

Dragon is a cooperation Programme between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of the P.R. China. The Programme, initiated in 2004, focuses on the exploitation of ESA, Third Party Missions (TPM) and Chinese Earth Observation (EO) data for geo-science and applications development in land, ocean and atmospheric applications. In particular, the Programme brings together joint SinoEuropean teams to investigate 50 thematic projects. In this paper, the results of the research projects1 in the thematic field “Land and Environment” will be briefly presented, whereas emphasis will be given in the assessment of the usefulness of the results for an integrated assessment of the state of the environment in the respective study areas. Furthermore new knowledge gained in such fields as desertification assessment, drought and epidemics’ monitoring, forest modeling, cropwatch monitoring, climate change vulnerability (including climate change adaptation and mitigation plans), urbanization monitoring and land use/cover change assessment and monitoring, will be presented. Such knowledge will be also linked to the capacities of Earth Observation systems (and of the respective EO data) to support the temporal, spatial and spectral requirements of the research studies. The potential of DRAGON to support such targets as “technology and knowledge transfer at the bilateral level”, “common EO database for exploitation” and “data sharing and open access data policy” will be also presented. Finally special consideration will be given in highlighting the replication potential of the techniques as developed in the course of the projects, as well as on the importance of the scientific results for environmental policy drafting and decision making

Memoria del Mapa de Condición de la Tierra en España 2000-2010. Prueba definitiva del libro entregado a imprenta.

This dataset is an archive of gridded surfaces of mean maximum, mean and mean minimum temperature, and precipitation, for the Iberian Peninsula. Temporal resolution is of 1 month, and spatial resolution is of 0.0089999994 degrees. The study area ranges from 43.8969994ºN through 35.5000000ºN, and from 9.6999998ºW through 3.5029993ºE. It covers continental Spain and Portugal. There is a total of 1920 grids (40 years x 12 months x 4 variables). The surfaces were interpolated using ANUSPLIN on georeferenced climate records drawn from the Spanish State Agency of Meteorology and the Portuguese Water Resources Information System. Variable networks of input stations were used to interpolate the surfaces, averaging 390 and 1877 points for temperature and precipitation respectively. A fixed configuration was used for all the interpolations: trivariate quadratic spline model with longitude, latitude and elevation as independent variables. A square root transformation was appied to precipitation fields to reduce skewness. The software was made to minimize the Generalized Cross Validation (GCV) error. The signal to data point ratio was below 50% for temperature surfaces, with many values between 25% and 35%. This suggests limitations in the number of input data points which may have resulted in a loss of detail on the interpolated surfaces. This is not necessarily bad in terms of broad spatial patterns, but it does indicate that absolute predictions should be used with caution for fine microclimatic patterns. Root generalized cross validation was usually lower than 1ºC for temperature, reaching up to 0.85ºC for summer months of mean maximum temperature. Absolute errors in precipitation did range from 4.41 mm in July to 12.82 mm in December, but the seasonal pattern of prediction errors was inverse and corresponded to 24% and 13% respectively.

Most of the recent studies and projections of precipitation patterns, based on records observed in the past and climate change scenarios for the Mediterranean basin, suggest a relatively slow decrease in rainfall amounts over the years but an increase in the frequency of extreme precipitation events. These are key factors in desertification processes and these will cause social and environmental impacts in the short term, mainly because changes in heavy rainfall events may have severe implications and impacts on soil erosion, resulting in increased risk of soil degradation. The main objective of the present work is to evaluate the spatial–temporal dynamics of extreme precipitation events in southern Portugal, using a direct sequential simulation algorithm (DSS models) in order to assess the relationships between spatial and temporal extreme rainfall patterns. Local probability density functions (pdfs) and spatial uncertainty are evaluated by a set of equiprobable simulated images of the chosen extreme precipitation indices. The used dataset in this work comprises a set of 105 station records of observed daily precipitation within the period 1961–2000. Two indices of extreme precipitation were selected: one representing the frequency of extremely heavy precipitation events (R30) and another characterizing the occurrence of dry events (RL10), both obtained from observed daily precipitation series. Results show that the spatial continuity of extreme precipitation events has increased in the last 40 years in southern Portugal. It also demonstrates a decrease in spatial variability, implying that extreme precipitation events tend to be more spatially homogeneous, which may have a severe impact on water resources, agriculture and soil erosion, particularly when associated with desertification risks.

Diagnosis of land condition is a basic prerequisite for finding the degradation of a territory under climatic and human pressures leading to desertification. Ecosystemic approaches, such as the one presented here, address ecosystem maturity or resilience. They are low cost, not very prone to error propagation and well-suited to implementation on remotely sensed time–series data covering large areas. The purposes of this work were to develop a land condition surveillance methodology based on the amount of biomass produced per unit rainfall, and to test it on the Iberian Peninsula. In this article, we propose parallel and complementary synchronic assessment and diachronic monitoring procedures to overcome the paradox of monitoring as a sequence of assessments. This is intrinsically contradictory when dealing with complex landscape mosaics, as relative estimators commonly produced for assessment are often difficult to set in a meaningful time sequence. Our approach is built on monthly time–series of two types of data, a vegetation density estimator (Green Vegetation Fraction-GVF) derived from Global Environmental Monitoring satellite archives, and corresponding interpolated climate fields. Rain Use Efficiency (RUE) is computed on two time scales to generate assessment classes. This enables detrended comparisons across different climate zones and provides automatic detection of reference areas to obtain relative RUE. The monitoring procedure uses raw GVF change rates over time and aridity in a stepwise regression to generate subclasses of discriminated trends for those drivers. The results of assessment and monitoring are then combined to yield the land condition diagnostics through explicit rules that associate their respective categories. The approach was tested in the Iberian Peninsula for the period 1989 to 2000 using monthly GVF images derived from the 1-km MEDOKADS archive based on the NOAA-AVHRR sensors, and a corresponding archive of climate variables. The resul

Some highways were built in the Basque country before environmental impact assessment processes required the implementation of wildlife crossing structures. Some highway sectors were selected because they intersected with sites of high landscape connectivity between protected natural areas. These were identified using a Geographic Information System-based connectivity model that represented the spatial ecology of large and medium-sized mammal species. Permeability of road sectors was analysed by calculating the density of crossing structures considered adequate for target species and comparing it with the recommended density in technical prescriptions for new highways. Additionally, factors that could limit movement across these structures were also analysed, such as the shortage of forest cover in the surroundings or the presence of obstacles. An approximation of permeability deficits has been obtained, and a set of corrective measures that must be implemented into landscape defragmentation frameworks has been identified.

Conservation networks, such as the European Natura 2000, are sets of designated reserves, the persistence of which requires the contribution of the non-protected territory in terms of connectivity. For that reason, the European Union´s Habitats Directive urges the improvement of its ecological coherence. This work reports a spatial modelling methodology to complete the existing Natura 2000 network in the Basque Country with elements of ecological connectivity. It is based on cost surfaces built for a set of target species associated with the dominant habitats of the region. Least-cost paths were then used to identify zones of probable connection between reserves. The final network is made of core areas, link corridors, link areas and buffer zones, all with an explicit spatial allocation. The regional government of the Basque Country subsequently incorporated this ecological network as a reference for the evaluation of regional development plans in 2005.

The relationships between the spatial distribution of ground-cover and terrain attributes were examined in the Tabernas badlands (SE Spain) in order to understand the terrain-dependent driving forces of the spatially heterogeneous ground cover. Ground cover was mapped in the field and terrain attributes were derived from a 1-m resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM). The association of spatial distribution of the landforms resulting from a regionalisation (using a nonhierarchical classification of the topographic overlays) and the ground-cover pattern was proved. From the analysis of relationships between terrain attributes and proportional abundance of ground-cover types, it was found that ground cover is arranged along topographic gradients: plant-covered surfaces are more abundant on low slope angles, concave slopes, relatively large contributing areas and with low length slope factor values. Unvegetated surfaces show contrary trends and lichens are associated with intermediate conditions. Relationships with local terrain attributes, such as slope angle or elevation, are more pronounced than those with terrain attributes related to sediment and water transfer, such as contributing area, wetness index or length slope factor which could be explained by the heterogeneity of runoff that is usually shorter than the hillslope length. The relationships established between the spatial distribution of ground-cover types and terrain attributes provide the basis for future development of a tool for mapping spatial distribution of ground cover in similar areas from only topographic information. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.