The historical transformation of the landscape between economy, ecology and history: can we test the Margalef ’s hypothesis?

Abstract

We present a summary of the theoretical insights and the combination of methods used by the international research project in environmental history called “Sustainable farm systems: long-term socio-ecological metabolism in western agriculture”, which combines the energy and material flow analysis from an agroecology or an ecological economics
standpoint with the study of land cover and land-use changes environmentally evaluated using the metrics and indices of landscape ecology. The basic hypothesis guiding the project is the idea of Ramon Margalef according to which the traditional agro-forestry landscape mosaics are a good way of exploiting nature, which even increase biodiversity thanks of using different levels of anthropic energy dissipation per unit area within an integrated matrix able to combine production with conservation. The maps of ecological structure and ecological connectivity are showing the effects of having abandoned these mosaics during the second half of the twentieth century.

Keywords: agroecosystems, landscape ecology, social metabolism, energy and nutrients balances, socioecological transitions.