Introduction: Agroforestry in Spain
Between 1993 and 2008, the Agrarian Degraded Land Reforestation Program was executed in Extremadura, Spain, which consisted of the reforestation of abandoned agricultural lands or those with very poor economic productivity. More than 70,000 hectares changed use from agriculture to forestry.
Several years after this experience, LANDMARC will focus its research on the inventory and monitoring of some of these farms, and the evaluation of the potential of these lands. Apart from other ecosystem benefits, the forests have the advantage of storing carbon in biomass and soil above the pre-program values.
For selected farms, all the technical, administrative and economic documentation of the files related to the Program will be compiled. Likewise, the cartographic documentation will be compiled and organized, and a Geographic Information System elaborated where all the shapefiles necessary for the monitoring, evaluation and analysis of the evolution in time of the pilot farms will be stored.
Our work will also combine a compilation of coverage and analysis on georeferenced information from remote sensing and LIDAR mapping, taken in different years, to assess the growth of the forest mass. It will be complemented by field measurements and monitoring using in situ forest technologies (Field Map and drones) for the inventory of trees and shrubs. All current forest vegetation and biodiversity indices will be estimated, and the entire existing forest mass characterized.
This will allow validation of satellite monitoring and comparison with current and previous orthophotos and maps. Along with the initial edaphological documentation and the soil maps, new soil samples will be extracted and analyzed to evaluate the edaphological variables of organic matter, carbon and nitrogen, among others.
