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Content archived on 2022-12-23

Understanding natural and anthropogenic causes of desertification and land degradation in the Mediteranean basin

Objective



The Mediterranean Landscape in the Eastern Adriatic is an extremely fragile ecosystem.
Although changes in natural environment were always apparent, they have never been more dramatic than in the last 50 years.
It is essential that such changes should be seen in a long-term perspective, as this will allow the identification and understanding of both environmental and sociocultural causes of landscape degradation. Although many states of Eastern Europe often have specialised thematic data, these are often out of date (i.e.
not suitable for modern analytical approaches) or user-restricted. New technology such as available in the EC should be applied to datacollection and analysis.
We propose the use of remote sensing and GIS in a framework such as that developed by the original proposal, coupled with modelling techniques and an emphasis on the human-environmental co-evolutic to gain an insight into the extent and causes of soil degradation in Slovenia, and to serve as a basis for monitoring such degradation in the future.
Concretely, our aims are (1) To encourage application of the new technology in collecting and analysing the natural and social environment in Slovenia and Croatia, (2) to develop a new methodological framework of evaluating changes and degradation of the landscape based on the long-term observation of the human-environment relationship; (3) to provide the relevant background for decision-making in regional planning for Mediterranean areas which aims at minimising the environmental damage.
There will be a particular emphasis on the specific problems of island communities in the region by taking the Central Dalmatian islands of Hvar, Brac and Vis as areas of study.
In these islands, the very fragile karst environment has in recent decades been placed under heavy stress from popular tourism, and a re-evaluation is opportune, and will provide us with much-needed insight into thc role of tourism, as well as an indication in which direction development could be steered one normal circumstances prevail, and tourism resumes. Moreover, these islands have been the subject of intensive data-gathering on the topic in the last years before the present hostilities; this included data on the long-term evolution of vegetation, soils and settlement pat tern.

Call for proposal

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Coordinator

University of Cambridge
EU contribution
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Address
Downing Street
CB2 3EZ Cambridge
United Kingdom

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Total cost
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Participants (1)