The Loss of Landscape Ecological Functionality in the Barcelona Province (1956-2009): Could Land-Use History Involve a Legacy for Current Biodiversity?

Abstract

Could past land uses, and the land cover changes carried out, affect the current landscape capacity to maintain biodiversity? If so, knowledge of historical landscapes and their socio-ecological transitions would be useful for sustainable land use planning. We constructed a GIS dataset in 10 × 10 km UTM cells of the province of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) for 1956 and 2009 with the changing levels of farming disturbance exerted through the human appropriation of photosynthetic net primary production (HANPP), and a set of landscape ecology metrics to assess the impacts of the corresponding land-use changes. Then, we correlated them with the spatial distribution of total species richness (including vascular plants, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) (...)