Assessment of agricultural land-use change for helping sustainable land management and landscape development

Abstract

Agriculture is nowadays expected to adopt “multifunctional” land use practice as a contribution to sustainable development of rural areas. We started a participatory research study in the Coteaux de Gascogne (France) to prospect local paths for agricultural systems contribution to landuse sustainability. The area considered is a study-site of the Long term Ecosystem Research network.Our first common objective is to understand how family-farm dynamics contribute to land-use change at the landscape level. We started therefore a spatially-explicit and exhaustive study of agricultural land use and its change since the 1950s at a reference area of limited size (4 villages). The method consists in survey at every farmer using land in the area using both a semi-directive questionnaire and farmland maps and the building up of a Geographic Information System (GIS). We present here the first results of our assessment of the variety in family-farms and their land use practice (56 farms). We discuss our perspectives for using these results and helping local land use development.