Modelling Soil Erosion by Grazing: Recent Developments and New Approaches

摘要

Grazing is still widely held responsible for land degradation. The interaction between grazing and erosion is still rather poorly understood. As a consequence, counter-measures and associated management techniques have been slow to develop in southern Europe compared with Australia. Developments in ecological and economic-ecological modelling have improved our understanding of the processes and enhanced management capacity. Some of these developments are reviewed and two applications are described. One is a model for semi-extensive grazing in dry Mediterranean mountain conditions in which the shepherds, on random paths, seek to optimise resources use for economic benefit. The other is a spatial optimisation of vegetation canopy to minimise erosion rates.