Elsevier

Applied Geography

Volume 90, January 2018, Pages 115-122
Applied Geography

Using high-resolution multitemporal imagery to highlight severe land management changes in Mediterranean vineyards

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2017.12.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Exploitation of multitemporal imagery at high spatial resolution.

  • Detection of a severe change in land management of vineyards.

  • First attempt to link the change in land management to geomorphology of the zone.

Abstract

Mediterranean vineyards are subjected to drastic changes due to socio-economic, physical and environmental drivers. Whereas global trends affecting the evolution of Mediterranean land cover are well-known, their descriptions at a fine spatial scale, i.e., a plot level of several decametres, and over long time periods are still underexplored. This lack of exploration persists despite the increase in multitemporal imagery at fine resolutions. As scale and stakeholders are often correlated, we hypothesize that monitoring land cover at fine spatial and temporal scale would help understanding the local drivers shaping landscapes. To that end, we exploited a database of aerial pictures to obtain classified and vectorized land uses at the field level during the past five decades of a large watershed. The land uses were analyzed to detect changes at the field level considering the evolution of vineyard management. Changes in land management were synthesized in transition matrices expressing gains, losses and swaps for each land use category and illustrated using chord and Sankey diagrams. The results showed both a change in land management through a severe transformation of vineyards areas, from goblet to trellised vineyards, during the 1980s and a progressive evolution of land uses from vineyards to urban areas, arboriculture areas and arable lands. This transformation resulted from the local policies on vineyard replanting and the arrival of mechanization.

Introduction

Landscape organization, in terms of land uses and management, is the result of centuries-old interaction between man and the environment (Agnoletti et al., 2011, Lieskovský et al., 2014). By definition, the land use encompasses the intentional role of people to adapt the natural land cover to their benefit (Verheye, 2004) whereas land management defines the way in which a given land use is administered by people (Foley et al., 2005). Among the variety of landscapes on Earth, vineyards are excellent case studies, as they represent a strong cultural legacy and support a crucial socioeconomic sector in European countries (Salome et al., 2014). Historical maps of vineyards were widely studied because they have faced several crises (Lieskovský et al., 2013, Lieskovský et al., 2015, Lieskovský et al., 2017, Pazúr et al., 2014, Incze and Novák, 2016). In Europe, the phylloxera aphid caused a total collapse of vineyard production in 1860s, until the grafting onto American vines finally succeeded. In France, the introduction of the Common Market in 1970, which allowed the Italians and Spanish to invest in the French interior market, caused a decrease in the growing of table grapes (Galet, 2008) in conjunction with a decrease in pesticides used in agriculture. In 1990, the arrival of vines “du nouveau monde” from the United States, Australia and Chile influenced vine production (Touzard & Laporte, 1998). As the global drivers affecting evolution of vineyards are well known, their monitoring at landscape scale to understand their driving forces is an essential step still under investigation (Houet, Verburg, & Loveland, 2010).

The driving forces shaping landscapes are both socio-economical and physical. Landscape consolidation is driven by political forces because it helps making large fields more suitable for industrial agriculture (Lieskovský et al., 2014). Landscape composition in land uses is also affected by social forces and particularly the land abandonment (Incze & Novák, 2016). Physical forces drived also landscape architecture and composition in land uses. For instance, geomorphological variables drived land use changes such as slope that affects field accessibility with machinery (Sluiter and Jong, 2006, Lieskovský et al., 2017). Altitude gradient can also affect the loss of natural areas in favour of agriculture expansion (Tovar, Seijmonsbergen, & Duivenvoorden, 2013). The pedological factors are also important to understand land settlement on fertile soils for example (Lieskovský et al., 2015, Lieskovský et al., 2014). As explained below, land management is also affected by socio-economical and physical forces.

Historical evolution of vineyards in regards to other land uses have been largely analyzed in Europe, but a change in land management of the vineyards is still lacking. Tracking subtle changes in land management is sometimes more difficult than for land uses because it necessitates a resolution of the historical maps higher or equal to the metre to distinguish between vineyard types (Delenne et al., 2008). In the same way, changes in land management acted at a smaller scale than for changes in land uses. For example, weeding practices in vineyards were mainly governed by local government areas (Biarnes, Bailly, & Boissieux, 2009). As scales and stakeholders are often correlated (Hein, van Koppen, de Groot, & van Ierland, 2006), monitoring the evolution of vineyard management help us explain the role of local stakeholders in a given area. There is now a large number of available images (Wulder, Masek, Cohen, Loveland, & Woodcock, 2012) to create diachronic maps but they have not always a sufficient resolution to detect changes in land management at field scale whereas the field scale is the main unit on which most decisions on the land management operate in agricultural landscapes (Thenail et al., 2009).

A large amount of research has been conducted on the study of land cover in various fields from LANDSAT images: urban expansion (Chen et al., 2006, Qin et al., 2006, Yuan et al., 2005), urbanization of agricultural zones (Liu et al., 2003, Stefanov et al., 2001, Yang and Lo, 2002), forest disturbance (Gibbs et al., 2010, Huang et al., 2010, Mertens and Lambin, 2000, Tovar et al., 2013), desertification monitoring (Dawelbait and Morari, 2012, Symeonakis et al., 2007) and several ecological applications (Cohen & Goward, 2004). However, image classification for determining land cover categories is limited by satellite resolution (higher than 30 m) for these series, and changes in land use or land management operation at the field scale cannot be evaluated by LANDSAT images.

The texture of the field entity could provide information about the type of land use (Trias-Sanz, 2006) and even the land management of vineyards (Delenne et al., 2008, Wassenaar et al., 2002). Furthermore, spatial segmentation is driven by the raster dataset, which is composed of regular squared cells from one to several decametres, and is different from the irregular shapes that form the field entities, the latter being studied using object-based image analysis (OBIA).

By extracting valuable information from various satellite images at different spatial resolutions, from 50 cm to several metres, OBIA is well suited for performing land change studies at the field scale (Benz et al., 2004, Blaschke, 2010). A large number of studies has been devoted to ecological applications (Xie et al., 2008, Yu et al., 2006 for example) or urban features (for a review, see Blaschke (2010)), but only few OBIA studies have been conducted at the field level (Karakizi and Karantzalos, 2015, Qiu et al., 2014, Zhou and Troy, 2008), and never during long time periods.

The difficulty in studying land use changes at the field scale for large spatial and temporal extents is mainly driven by dataset resolution. The availability of remotely sensed data over long time periods (Wulder et al., 2012) and the constant improvements of photogrammetric and digitalization tools for such spatial database analyses make these studies possible (Grekousis, Mountrakis, & Kavouras, 2016). Arnaud et al. (2015) realized historical geomorphic analysis over 80 years in France thanks to the release of aerial photographs from the Institut Geographique National (IGN), for instance.

The study reported land use changes at the field scale over a time period of 50 years using aerial images of Mediterranean vineyards. We hypothesize that a high-resolution database could provide information about changes in land management of vineyards, providing that the time period encompasses the wine crises periods with sufficient temporal resolution. We aim to determine changes in land use categories at the field level using both field number and field area.

Section snippets

Composition and configuration of the dataset at the field scale

The study area corresponds to the Peyne watershed, which covers approximately 76 km2 and is located in Languedoc-Roussillon in southern France (43° 35′N, 3° 19′E). The smaller enclosed watershed is called the Bourdic subwatershed and covers 7 km2. Both the Peyne and Bourdic watersheds were used for further analyses depending on the temporal richness of the dataset. The area of the Peyne watershed is mostly covered by perennial crops (mainly vineyards), and five towns are present in the zone (

Evolution of landscape architecture at field scale

The number of field entities in the entire area started at 15000 in 1962 but decreased to 8400 in 2012. The median area of field entities increased from 2600 m2 in 1962–4500 m2 in 2012. The highest evolution of field numbers was found during the period of 1970–1990 (data not shown). When considering cultivated areas, other land areas, goblet vines and arboriculture exhibited a median area that was approximately half the size of the median area of trellised, transition vines fields (5500 m2).

Analysis of transitions between land use categories

Transitions between land use categories at the field scale are explained by regional history

The transition between land use categories over time, as determined using Sankey and chord diagrams, revealed the history of the zone during the past century, driven by a profound transformation of vineyards and an expansion of urbanized areas, with the introduction of new land uses, such as arboriculture and annual crops (Galet, 2008, Sluiter and Jong, 2006).

Land reparcelling from 1970 to 1990 strongly influenced the evolution of the landscape, resulting in a decrease of the number of land

Conclusion

The methodology presented in this paper is devoted to the analysis of high resolution dataset in time and space, with a particular attention to the transformation of vineyards management due to local policies. It necessitates a dataset with a spatial resolution sufficient to detect subtle differences between land managements of a given land use. It is best suited to perennial crops rather than annual ones because it is primarly devoted to the study of global trends rather than cyclic variations

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Matthieu Bourmaud, Florent Levavasseur, Marina Chauvet, François-Xavier Weber, and Maxime Jourde for their help in manual digitalization of land use categories. This research was supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the ALMIRA project (ANR-12-TMED-0003). This work was also supported by the metaprogramme Adaptation of Agriculture and Forests to Climate Change (AAFCC) of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) through the LACCAVE

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