Soil erosion control in a pasture‐dominated Mediterranean mountain environment under global change

Soil erosion control is critical to global food production and ecosystem health worldwide, and particularly in the Mediterranean region, which is prone to erosion and is expected to be strongly affected by climatic and anthropogenic changes. In this paper, we explore how land use and management (LUM) can mitigate climate change impacts and increase agricultural attractiveness in pasture‐dominated Mediterranean mountain environments. One originality of the proposed research is to combine LUM scenarios incorporating environmental and socio‐economic behaviour with distributed process‐based modelling to simulate the impacts of global change. Specifically, soil erosion for different combinations of current and plausible future climate and LUM conditions were simulated on a small watershed located in eastern Sicily (Italy) using the LandSoil model. LUM scenarios were established as a modulation of environmental protection and agricultural production/diversification. The main management distinctions tested in this paper included intensive versus extensive practices for pasture, and conventional versus conservative practices for cereals and orchards. Simulations showed that the impact of climate change was very low and not significant in the studied watershed (i.e., −1.78% of erosion on average). Under current climate and compared to the baseline, LUM scenarios reported an increase in erosion for the business‐as‐usual (S1, +6.0%), market‐oriented (S2, +57.2%) and sustainability‐oriented (S4, +0.9) scenarios, respectively, whereas the nature‐oriented scenario led to a slight reduction in erosion (S3, −11.3%). Our results also emphasised that agricultural diversification coupled with adaptations in practices and management can improve the attractiveness of agriculture in pasture‐dominated environments while maintaining soil protection at an acceptable level.