ORCID Profile
0000-0002-4611-3639
Current Organisation
AgroParisTech
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Publisher: Routledge
Date: 28-04-2017
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 28-08-2018
DOI: 10.3390/SU10093065
Abstract: Impacts of climate change are likely to be marked in areas with steep climatic transitions. Species turnover, spread of invasive species, altered productivity, and modified processes such as fire regimes can all spread rapidly along ecotones, which challenge the current paradigms of ecosystem management. We conducted a literature review at a continental-wide scale of South-Western European forests, where the drier and warmer conditions of the Mediterranean have been widely used as ex les of what is expected in more temperate areas. Results from the literature point to: (a) an expansion of slow-growing evergreen hardwood trees (b) increased dieback and mortality episodes in forests (both natural and planted) mostly related to competition and droughts, and mainly affecting conifers and (c) an increase in emergent diseases and pests of keystone-trees used in agroforestry zones. There is no consensus in the literature that fire regimes are directly increasing due to climate change, but available satellite data of fire intensity in the last 17 years has been lower in zones where agroforestry practices are dominant compared to unmanaged forests. In contrast, there is agreement in the literature that the current spread of fire events is probably related to land abandonment patterns. The practice of agroforestry, common in all Mediterranean countries, emerges as a frequent recommendation in the literature to cope with drought, reduce fire risk, and maintain bio erse landscapes and rural jobs. However, it is unknown the extent to which the open vegetation resulting from agroforestry is of interest to forest managers in temperate areas used to exploiting closed forest vegetation. Hence, many transitional areas surrounding the Mediterranean Basin may be left unmanaged with potentially higher climate-change risks, which require active monitoring in order to understand and help ongoing natural adaptation processes.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 16-11-2017
DOI: 10.1111/FAF.12251
Publisher: IOP Publishing
Date: 27-09-2021
Abstract: Urban sprawl impacts are critical in the evaluation of planning decisions and often monitored by indicators of soil sealing. In France, these indicators are required by law to be reported in environmental assessments of planning documents. Although monitoring of soil sealing is important to limit environmental impacts, focusing on this sole dimension in urban planning can be reductive. In this paper, we explore to what extent ecosystem services (ES) indicators, measuring the benefits to humans provided by healthy ecosystems, are captured by soil sealing indicators by comparing their temporal and spatial evolutions. Through consulting with urban planning stakeholders, we model and map the spatial and temporal evolutions over a 35 year period of soil sealing and eight priority ES in the Paris metropolitan area (agricultural potential, groundwater recharge, global climate regulation, water quality regulation through nutrient retention, urban heat mitigation, flood mitigation, recreational potential and natural heritage). We highlight the spatial and temporal matches and mismatches between the two types of indicators (ES and soil sealing) and demonstrate that a large part of ES variations are not well captured by soil sealing indicators in time and space (spatial match with the eight ES is only found for 10% of the Paris metropolitan area). This calls for finer, ES-based, diagnosis in land use planning that could usefully illuminate the gains and losses related to land use and land management policies by taking into account the environmental and societal impacts of urban sprawl.
No related grants have been discovered for Harold Levrel.