Spatial patterns of farm land use in fragmented semi-arid landscapes: The case of Lebna catchment (Cap Bon, Tunisia)

Insaf Mekki (1) , Anne Biarnès (2, 3) , Jean-Stéphane Bailly (4, 3) , Fabrice Vinatier (5, 3) , Hichem Chebbi (1, 5) , Tarek Ajmi (1) , Yves Blanca (2, 3) , Frédéric Jacob (2, 3) , Abdelaziz Zairi (1)

1 INRGREF - Institut National de Recherche en Génie Rural Eaux et Forêts
2 IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement
3 UMR LISAH - Laboratoire d'étude des Interactions Sol - Agrosystème - Hydrosystème
4 AgroParisTech
5 INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique

Mediterranean agricultural landscapes provide ecosystem services driven by land use patterns such as crop spatial distribution (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Assessing the determinants of crop location is therefore a prerequisite for exploring spatially explicit land use scenarios and evaluating the subsequent ecosystem services (Benoît et al., 2012). Although remote sensing techniques are now able to provide time series of land use patterns, they do not permit to identify the driving factors of crop location that are related to farm characteristics. Intra-farm land fragmentation is a typical characteristic of rural landscapes (Demetriou, 2014), and we hypothesized in the current study that it may strongly influence crop spatial patterns. Therefore, the current paper aimed to study the impact of farmland fragmentation in crop location within a semi-arid rural zone of Tunisia, with a focus on spatiotemporal dependencies.

Mots clés: crop; spatio-temporal; pattern; tunisia

Domaines: Milieux et Changements globaux; Science des sols; Machine Learning [stat.ML]

Insaf Mekki, Anne Biarnès, Jean-Stéphane Bailly, Fabrice Vinatier, Hichem Chebbi, et al.. Spatial patterns of farm land use in fragmented semi-arid landscapes: The case of Lebna catchment (Cap Bon, Tunisia). AgroMed International Conference 2016, INRA, Dec 2016, Avignon, France. ⟨hal-01408479⟩