Wild and domestic ungulates complement each other to maintain ecosystems. Therefore, ecology experts recommend maintaining both traditional transhumant grazing and supervising abandoned agroforestry areas that are being reclaimed by nature. The study, published in the journal Landscape Ecology, represents progress in understanding how Mediterranean ecosystems could evolve in the context of climate change. In recent years, abandoning traditional practices, in line with climate changes, has transformed agropastoral systems in Mediterranean landscapes. As a result of this phenomenon, there is an increasingly frequent process of renaturalization and change in affected environments, known as passive rewilding. Although this process can bring benefits such as greater climate resilience and refuge for certain wildlife species, it also entails the loss of diverse cultural landscapes and increasingly uncommon traditional uses. To understand the future evolution of these ecosystems and discover keys that help in their conservation, it is essential to evaluate their long-term climate responses under different conditions that consider both domestic species grazing and the presence of wild ungulates. In this context, a study conducted by researchers from the Department of Applied Biology at UMH, Marina Rincón Madroñero, José Antonio Sánchez Zapata, and Jomar M. Barbosa, along with researcher Xavier Barber from the Operations Research Center of the same university, is framed. The scientists conducted their work in southeast Spain, in the Sierra de Cazorla, Segura y las Villas Natural Park, with a dual purpose: to evaluate the climate's effect on landscape-scale primary productivity and to analyze long-term trends in vegetation biomass in response to passive rewilding or the maintenance of traditional grazing systems. More specifically, two areas with very similar characteristics were analyzed, located... |