Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Land use changes
Vasilios P. Papanastasis
8.1 Introduction
Land is an important natural resource for the survival and prosperity of people and
for the maintenance of terrestrial ecosystems, including the Mediterranean moun-
tains. It is often regarded as equivalent to soils and topography but this is not correct.
According to the FAO (1997), land has a wider sense that implies not only the land
surface and its underlying superficial deposits but also its attributes such as climate,
water, plants, animals and humans with their activities. This means that land is a
complex entity encompassing physical, biological, environmental, infrastructural,
social and economic factors that interact with each other.
On the other hand, land is finite and immovable, which suggests that it can neither
increase in size nor be transported. On the contrary, people who use the land for
the production of commodities useful for their survival may move and increase in
numbers and impose high demands, or decrease and reduce their pressure. This
means that there is a constantly changing relationship between people and land
(Davis, 1976). Land use therefore refers to the type of human activity taking place
on land. It is characterized by the arrangements, activities and inputs by people to
produce, change or maintain a certain land cover type (Di Gregorio and Jansen,
1998). This implies a direct link between land cover and the actions of people on
their environment. Consequently, there is a close relationship between land use and
land cover, the latter considered to be the observed biophysical cover of the Earth's
surface (Cihlar and Jansen, 2001).
Mediterranean mountains have a long history of human intervention, which has
modified land cover and resulted in numerous land use changes over time. In clas-
sical Greece (fourth to fifth centuries BC), for example, people exploited the envi-
ronment and used or abused its natural resources such as forests and game species
(Papanastasis
et al.,
2010). However, Grove and Rackham (2001) claim that modern
Mediterranean landscape has surprisingly changed little since ancient times, except
for coasts, deltas and marshes. On the contrary, McNeill (1992) argues that for
most of the mountains the changes that destroyed the environment and left behind
