EGU25-11266, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-11266
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Investigating spatial patterns of land degradation and land management in olive orchards across Europe
Pasquale Borrelli1,2, Christine Alewell2, Konstantinos Kaffas1, Francis Matthews1, Panos Panagos3, and Philipp Saggau1
Pasquale Borrelli et al.
  • 1Department of Science, Rome Tre Universty, Rome, Italy
  • 2Department of Environmental Sciences, Environmental Geosciences, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
  • 3European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy

Land degradation (LD), which affects soil, vegetation, and water resources, poses serious threats to agricultural productivity, biodiversity, and ecosystem functions. Here, we present a new approach to assess LD at the farm level, specifically within Mediterranean olive orchards, leveraging the modified Land Multidegradation Index (LMI) (Prăvălie et al., 2024) which builds on the framework established by the European Union Soil Observatory (EUSO) (Panagos et al. 2024). The approach identifies and quantifies multiple LD pathways, including soil erosion, salinity, compaction, organic matter depletion, and pollution. Field data from 53 olive orchard sites across Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Marocco, as part of the Horizon Europe project SOIL O-LIVE, informed the methodological development. Indicators of LD were integrated into a scoring system, capturing the extent and interplay of LD processes. Preliminary findings are presented alongside a Shiny App web viewer developed by the Environmental Modeling and Global Change Lab (BorrelliLAB) of Roma Tre University to investigate spatial patterns of LD and land management across the Mediterranean Europe.

Acknowledgement: P.B, K.K, F.M. were funded by the European Union Horizon Europe Project Soil O-LIVE (Grant No. 101091255). P.S. was funded by the European Union Horizon Europe Project AI4SoilHealth (Grant No. 101086179).

References

Panagos, P., Borrelli, P., Jones, A., & Robinson, D. A. (2024). A 1 billion euro mission: A Soil Deal for Europe. European Journal of Soil Science, 75(1), e13466.

Prăvălie, R., Borrelli, P., Panagos, P., Ballabio, C., Lugato, E., Chappell, A., ... & Birsan, M. V. (2024). A unifying modelling of multiple land degradation pathways in Europe. Nature Communications, 15(1), 3862.

How to cite: Borrelli, P., Alewell, C., Kaffas, K., Matthews, F., Panagos, P., and Saggau, P.: Investigating spatial patterns of land degradation and land management in olive orchards across Europe, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-11266, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-11266, 2025.