Agroforestry offers proven strategies as an environmentally benign and ecologically sustainable land management practice to promote ecosystem services. In this literature review, we systematically consider the agroforestry and ecosystem services literature with the aim to identify and catalogue…
Land abandonment is a global phenomenon whose environmental consequences are difficult to assess. The Murcia region is one of the most arid regions in southern Europe and also one of the most prone to land abandonment. This study researches which environmental features are more relevant to…
The Member States of the European Union have committed to the maintenance and protection of forest lands. More precisely, the Member States aim to ensure the sustainable development and management of the EU's forests. For 2013, Eurostat's statistics about primary and secondary wood…
Comprehensive maps that characterize the variation in agricultural landscapes across Europe are lacking. In this paper we present a new Europe-wide, spatially-explicit typology and inventory of the diversity in composition, spatial structure and management intensity of European agricultural…
Despite numerous research efforts over the last decades, integrating the concept of ecosystem services into land management decision-making continues to pose considerable challenges. Researchers have developed many different frameworks to operationalize the concept, but these are often specific…
AIM: Global environmental changes challenge traditional conservation approaches based on the selection of static protected areas due to their limited ability to deal with the dynamic nature of driving forces relevant to biodiversity. The Natura 2000 network (N2000) constitutes a major milestone…
Iberian dehesa and montado are paradigmatic high nature value (HNV) agroforestry systems in Europe. Nevertheless their conservation status is uncertain as a consequence of their typological variety, different intensity of management practices on the ground, and other ongoing processes…
Globally, peatlands are regarded as important carbon stores and their conservation essential for ensuring continuation of terrestrial carbon storage. Numerous peatlands in particular regions of Europe have been degraded by drainage, burning, extraction, overgrazing and pollution in recent…
Multifunctional land use has become a widely supported pathway for Europe's countryside. Brussels and the national governments stimulate farmers to integrate primary production with non-agricultural practices from which they can also benefit. In favour of this development different…
The most prominent factors inducing landscape change in the rural regions of south west Europe are depopulation and the associated socio-ecological modifications. The aim of this work was to assess the future implications of these processes on land use/land cover and biodiversity in northwest…
Many Europeans are concerned about the living conditions of farm animals because they view animals as beings that possess interests of their own. Against this background the introduction of an animal welfare label is being intensively discussed in Europe. In choosing a market-based instrument to…
In Europe, and particularly in the Mediterranean Basin, the abandonment of traditional land-use practices has been reported as one of the main causes of decline for open-habitat species. Data from large-scale bird and butterfly monitoring schemes in the north-east Iberian Peninsula were used to…