Investigating syndromes of agricultural land degradation through past trajectories and future scenarios

In the last decades, due to climate changes, soil deterioration and land use/land cover (LULC) changes, land degradation (LD) has become one of the most important issues at the global, regional and local scale. In concrete terms, LD determines a reduction in the productivity of a territory and in its capacity of providing ecosystem goods and services. “Syndromes” of LD can be assessed in the past, and scenarios, conversely, can be developed for the future, as information baselines for sustainable land management strategies and interventions. LULC information is essential for identifying change trajectories and associated LD processes, and for deriving prediction rules. Methodological issues and results of studies led within the framework of the research project AGROSCENARI (Adaptation scenarios of Italian agriculture to climate change) are discussed in this paper, analysing the case of the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy. Two key trajectories are investigated in detail: artificialization on the one hand, and scrubland and forestland expansion on the other. The first trajectory is associated with LD especially in terms of physical loss of farming land and soil sealing. The second trajectory is related to abandonment of agricultural land, and linked to LD processes such as soil erosion and hydrological instability, and to wildfires. The identification of such spatially explicit LD syndromes, which can also be projected on the basis of future scenarios, allows proposing and evaluating focussed measures of sustainable land management.