Potential Land-Use Ecological Plan - 

Application to Portugal

 

The goal of this Project is to propose a Potential Land Use Plan for Continental Portugal, taking into naccount the ecological landsuitability for the establishment of different activities and the current land use. The approach will be in the light of work thathas already been produced within the Landscape Architecture Research Centre “Prof. Caldeira Cabral” (CEAP), FCT Project “National Ecological Network (NEN) - a proposal of mapping and policies” [PTDC/AUR-URB/102578/2008] concluded in 2013.

 

The aforementioned project defined the National Ecological Network for Continental Portugal, which contains key areas for the functioning of ecosystems that are characterized by the following factors, understood in terms of making part of a system, such as: relief, lithology, geomorphology, soil, water, vegetation and climate. Within the framework of the same project, a database for the country was established, with cartographic information produced by CEAP and other entities, in the fields of ecology and culture (activities).

 

The present project will be developed on three related subjects:

 

a) ecological land suitability [FAO76] [MaAbCoLo07][MaAbCoLo08];

b) the current land use map of Portugal 2007, recently produced by IGP [CaNuPe09] and

c) land uses adequacy atthe different landscape units of Portugal.

 

It is intended to create a proposal for Potential Land Use Plan for the country,including the uses by the following activities: nature conservation, agriculture, horticulture and forestry, leisure and recreational facilities, urban and rural areas and taking into account the manifold use of these activities, as well as possible restrictive use, namely situations that are sensitive from an ecological point of view.

 

Hence, this proposal integrates principles of ecological and cultural sustainability and will take account of the current reality concerning the areas of economy, energy, and production quality. These assumptions of Spatial Planning Model advocated by the team considers the need to plan appropriate uses that involveincreasing quality of life of populations and the sustainability of the landscape, with the necessary reduction of environmental hazards (floods, forest fires, landslides, etc.).

 

Also, this Spatial Planning Model imply the necessity to reduce the distances of the transport of the food products to the consumer and safeguard, even if not its totality, some autonomy in the food sectorand of materials which enable the country to reducethe balance of payments failure, reduce the prices, improve the quality of food and ensure the offer in case of crisis, be it a political or an economic crisis.

 

In this project it is intended to:

a) deepen the criteria of ecological land suitability for primary activities (agriculture, horticulture and forestry), broken down by cultures and types of population, on the basis of scientific criteria;

b) find a model for integration of these capacities, food needs of the people and current land use, given that the latter contains within it the human and economic resource availabilities that intervene in the landscape and that hold a certain crop;

c) given that the data to be used when establishing the Land Use Plan, also make it possible to study the evolution of land use in the country, including existing and expansion of urban and rural areas, this activity will also be one aspect taken into account within the framework of this project, thus allowing us to draw conclusions from the incorrect use, from the perspective of ecological sustainability, as well as to propose measures to be adopted in order to correct it.

 

The criteria for ecological capacity for nature conservation and its integration in an Ecological Network of Landscape as well asthe criteria of ecological capacity for existing urban areas, have been deepened by the research team of CEAP [Ma93][MaDiLa00] [MaAbCoLo07] [MaAbCoLo08]. When determining the ecological land suitability for human activities, we will use as a reference the methodology proposed by FAO [FAO76] [FAO84] which will be adapted to Portuguese circumstances. The devised Proposal of Land Use Plan will be compared with Spatial Plans that are currently in force, especially at national level with the National Program for a Spatial Plan Policy [PNPOT07].

 

The end result of this project will be, besides thePotential Land Use Plan, a proposal for public policies, in the form of regulations and proposals to amend existing Spatial Plan that are in force, as well as the identification and quantification of strategic topics in mapping of development policies. This project integrates besides its co-workers in the fields of earth science also co-workers from the fields of land cultivation (agriculture, horticulture and forestry), economy and agrarian sociology, memory of the evolution of landscape use (urban andrural).