Marull J.; Pino J. & Tello E. 2008. “The Loss of Territorial Efficiency: An Ecological Analysis of Land-Use Changes in Western Mediterranean Agriculture (Vallès County, Catalonia, 1853-2004)”. Global Environment.

Abstract

The aim of this study is to verify, by means of a diachronic use of various landscape ecology indices, that the huge increase in external energy expended by the agrarian systems following the “green revo-lution” in the second half of the twentieth century, together with the drastic reduction in their effi ciency, are closely related to the land-use changes that have brought about the degradation of the traditional Mediterranean landscapes, characterized as they were by agricultural and forest mosaics. Th e need to resort to external biophysical fl ows and the abandonment of integrated land-use management has led to the loss of the ecological functionality of the whole land matrix.