Restoration Stories are a deeper look at stories behind our Restoration Resource Center Featured Project. This month we're featuring the Renature Monchique project from Portugal. The goal of this partner-based project was to begin a process that assists private landowners affected by the 2018 wildfire to recover important endemic and naturalized species. The Monchique district is mountainous, boasting the highest peak in southern Portugal at 900 meters above sea level. Located approximately 20-30 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, from both the south and west, this area is affected by marine weather systems that bring early morning mists into the valleys and across the tops of watersheds supporting an orographic system, and on occasion during the summer, there can be short showers of rain – although this system is being interrupted by a changing climate and a persistent drought. Although abstract descriptions of the habitats for this area exist under the auspices of the Natura 2000 Habitat Annexes [2], most of these ecosystems and habitats have either been cleared or modified by human actions. What is known is that this area had a reasonable density of cork oak (Quercus suber) woodlands which exist today, although not as extensively as before owing to the introduction of industrial forestry.
The area has historically been used for subsistence agriculture, mostly owing to the low fertility of the schist-based soils. On the mountain syenite-based soils, terraces were constructed in the old tradition to produce vegetables, mostly potatoes, along with citrus tree fruits including chestnut trees (Castanea sativa). Most livestock were small herds of goats and sheep guarded by shepherds who moved these herds around the area – a practice that persists to this day, although less extensively.
However, during the period 1930 to 1960 the area was developed for more intensive agriculture resulting in the abandonment of the traditional terracing and livestock systems. Extensive cropping, such as corn and wheat, were introduced, even the production of rice in riparian areas as well as the introduction of cattle herds, resulting in the grassing of the terraces. These changes amounted to the overexploitation of the soils, resulting in soil erosion and soil compaction as the cattle herds moved around this vegetatively sensitive area. The collapse of these cropping systems in the 1950s and early 1960s changed the nature of this area again. Landowners switched to planting monoculture crops of eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus) and pine (Pinus pinaster) for the burgeoning pulp and paper industry.
Land abandonment over the last 50 or so years has increased because of socio-economic changes where landowners moved off their rural plots to nearby urban areas, either leaving their lands planted with industrial forest monocultures or because their lands were no longer productive. The ecosystems, or habitats, that covered this area were systematically cleared for both agriculture and later for planted forests. Today, fragmented remnants of these ecosystems exist, mostly in areas where it is impossible to manage planted forests, or on land that has been abandoned but not planted with monocultures. The landscape, with the introduction of machinery to clear land and to cut terraces into the hillsides for the forest industry, has evolved rapidly from what these landscapes were in the late 19th and early 20th century.