Browsing by Author "Viaud, Valérie"

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    Agroforestry creates carbon sinks whilst enhancing the environment in agricultural landscapes in Europe
    (Elsevier, 2019-03-06) Sonja, Kay; Rega, Carlo; Moreno, Gerardo; den Herder, Michael; Palma, João H. N.; Borek, Robert; Crous-Duran, Josep; Freese, Dirk; Giannitsopoulos, Michail; Graves, Anil; Jäger, Mareike; Lamersdorf, Norbert; Memedemin, Daniyar; Mosquera-Losada, Rosa; Pantera, Anastasia; Paracchini, Maria Luisa; Paris, Pierluigi; Roces-Díaz, José V.; Rolo, Victor; Rosati, Adolfo; Sandor, Mignon; Smith, Jo; Szerencsits, Erich; Varga, Anna; Viaud, Valérie; Wawer, Rafal; Burgess, Paul J.; Herzog, Felix
    Agroforestry, relative to conventional agriculture, contributes significantly to carbon sequestration, increases a range of regulating ecosystem services, and enhances biodiversity. Using a transdisciplinary approach, we combined scientific and technical knowledge to evaluate nine environmental pressures in terms of ecosystem services in European farmland and assessed the carbon storage potential of suitable agroforestry systems, proposed by regional experts. First, regions with potential environmental pressures were identified with respect to soil health (soil erosion by water and wind, low soil organic carbon), water quality (water pollution by nitrates, salinization by irrigation), areas affected by climate change (rising temperature), and by underprovision in biodiversity (pollination and pest control pressures, loss of soil biodiversity). The maps were overlaid to identify areas where several pressures accumulate. In total, 94.4% of farmlands suffer from at least one environmental pressure, pastures being less affected than arable lands. Regional hotspots were located in north-western France, Denmark, Central Spain, north and south-western Italy, Greece, and eastern Romania. The 10% of the area with the highest number of accumulated pressures were defined as Priority Areas, where the implementation of agroforestry could be particularly effective. In a second step, European agroforestry experts were asked to propose agroforestry practices suitable for the Priority Areas they were familiar with, and identified 64 different systems covering a wide range of practices. These ranged from hedgerows on field boundaries to fast growing coppices or scattered single tree systems. Third, for each proposed system, the carbon storage potential was assessed based on data from the literature and the results were scaled-up to the Priority Areas. As expected, given the wide range of agroforestry practices identified, the carbon sequestration potentials ranged between 0.09 and 7.29 t C ha−1 a−1. Implementing agroforestry on the Priority Areas could lead to a sequestration of 2.1 to 63.9 million t C a−1 (7.78 and 234.85 
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    Mixtures of forest and agroforestry alleviate trade-offs between ecosystem services in European rural landscapes
    (Elsevier, 2021-06-17) Rolo, Victor; Roces-Díaz, José V.; Torralba, Mario; Kay, Sonja; Fagerholm, Nora; Aviron, Stephanie; Burgess, Paul; Crous-Duran, Josep; Ferreiro-Domínguez, Nuria; Graves, Anil; Hartel, Tibor; Mantzanas, Konstantinos; Mosquera-Losada, María Rosa; Palma, João H. N.; Sidiropoulou, Anna; Szerencsits, Erich; Viaud, Valérie; Herzog, Felix; Plieninger, Tobias; Moreno, Gerardo
    Rural Europe encompasses a variety of landscapes with differing levels of forest, agriculture, and agroforestry that can deliver multiple ecosystem services (ES). Whilst provisioning and regulating ES associated with individual land covers are comparatively well studied, less is known about the associated cultural ES. Only seldom are provisioning, regulating, and cultural ES investigated together to evaluate how they contribute to multifunctionality. In this study we combined biophysical and sociocultural approaches to assess how different landscapes (dominated by forest, agriculture or agroforestry) and landscape characteristics (i.e. remoteness and landscape diversity) drive spatial associations of ES (i.e. synergies, trade-offs and bundles). We analysed data of: i) seven provisioning and regulating ES (spatially modelled), and; ii) six cultural ES (derived from participatory mapping data) in 12 study sites across four different biogeographical regions of Europe. Our results showed highly differentiated ES profiles for landscapes associated to a specific land cover, with agroforestry generally providing higher cultural ES than forest and agriculture. We found a positive relationship between the proportion of forest in a landscape and provisioning and regulating ES, whilst agriculture showed negative relationships. We found four distinct bundles of ES. Three of them were directly related to a dominant land cover and the fourth to a mixture of forest and agroforestry that was associated with high social value. The latter bundle was related to zones close to urban areas and roads and medium to high landscape diversity. These findings suggest that agroforestry should be prioritised over other land covers in such areas as it delivers a suite of multiple ES, provided it is close to urban areas or roads. Our results also illustrate the importance and application of including people’s perception in the assessment of ES associations and highlight the relevance of developing integrated analyses of ES to inform landscape management decisions.