Les manifestacions del canvi global en àrees de muntanya mediterrània. Un cas d’estudi al Baix Montseny

Abstract

Global change is a global process whose complexity requires multiple scales of study, including the local one. The Mediterranean region is particularly suitable for it, because historically there has been a significant interaction between society and environment, responsible for its current landscape diversity. Since the nineteenth century, and especially during the twentieth century, the mountain areas of Catalonia and the Mediterranean have experienced major socio-economic changes, related with the transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one, which have caused the abandonment of the dispersed farmhouses and its associated agrarian activities in favor of industrialized urban areas. These changes are considered to be responsible for important socioecological transformations, acting as driving forces of land use and land cover changes as well as landscape transformations. The biogeographical location of the study area, between the Montseny and the Montnegre mountains, is well suited for the study of global change at a local level. The duality between the dispersed farmhouses and the town of San Celoni, historically linked to craftwork and trade, becomes of great interest in order to study this industrialization process. For the analysis of these processes, a holistic and interdisciplinary historical perspective is required, allowing to integrate the socioeconomic and biophysical components of socioecological systems. Quantification and cartographic representation of changes in land use land cover between 1956 and 2010 was one of the central aims of this thesis, which has been compared with data from tax documentation (amillaraments) available for the study area in the mid-nineteenth century. The maps obtained for 1956 and 2010 allowed to analyze changes in land use and land cover, and changes in landscape configuration. The most important process detected is the significant reduction of crops, related with the regression of the primary sector, and responsible for the loss of open spaces. However, land covers associated with residential and industrial uses have grown as a result of the industrialization and the population growth of Sant Celoni, as well as suburbanization processes at a metropolitan region scale. One consequence of the decline of the primary activities is the loss of its associated socio-ecological heritage, which results from the interaction between humans and the environment. In this study, it has been considered that this heritage is linked to a particular spatial and temporal context, and embedded in a particular worldview, weakened and transformed by industrialization. In this context, the main objective of this thesis is to describe and analyze the components of Global Change at a local scale, taking the municipality of Sant Celoni as a case study.

Date of Award	16 Nov 2012
Original language	Catalan
Supervisor	Marti Boada Junca (Director) & Diego Varga Linde (Director)