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Introduction
Publications
Publications (130)
Mediterranean agriculture has coevolved with harsh environments and changing climate conditions over millennia, generating an extremely rich heritage of traditional knowledge; however, it is particularly threatened by climate change, including a higher than average warming and more frequent extreme climate events. The vulnerability is enhanced by t...
After World War II, the evolution of Europe's agro-food system has been marked by intensified use of synthetic fertilizers, territorial specialization, and integration in global food and feed markets. This evolution led to increased nitrogen (N) losses to aquatic environments and the atmosphere, which, despite increasing environmental regulations,...
Designing effective mitigation policies for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture requires understanding the mechanisms by which management practices affect emissions in different agroclimatic conditions. Agricultural GHG emissions and carbon sequestration potentials have been extensively studied in the Mediter-ranean biome, which is a bi...
Worldwide, Mediterranean cropping systems face the complex challenge of producing enough high-quality food while preserving the quantity and quality of scarce water for people and agriculture in the context of climate change. While good management of nitrogen (N) is paramount to achieving this objective, the efficient strategies developed for tempe...
The mitigation of greenhouse gases in the agri-food sector depends on production and consumption patterns. This study focuses on the impact of urban gardening activities on food consumption and the carbon footprint. Changes in the food habits of citizens involved in urban agriculture activities in the city of Madrid were assessed over a five-year p...
El impacto en el empleo de la transición agroecológica en España Informe
Early energy analyses of agriculture revealed that behind higher labor and land productivity of industrial farming, there was a decrease in energy returns on energy (EROI) invested, in comparison to more traditional organic agricultural systems. Studies on recent trends show that efficiency gains in production and use of inputs have again somewhat...
Future food farming technology faces challenges that must integrate the core goal of keeping the global temperature increase within 1.5 °C without reducing food security and nutrition. Here, we show that boosting the production of insects and earthworms based on food waste and livestock manure to provide food and feed in China will greatly contribu...
Modern food chains are energy intensive processes, which implies environmental impacts and a dependence on non-renewable resources. Nevertheless, some studies tend to underestimate
the energy use of transport by assuming some simplifications in their models or by not considering aggregate levels of analysis. Tomatoes are a key agricultural commodit...
There are many cropping systems followed in Floodplain soils for enhancing cropping intensity for increasing crop production, but greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions balances of agricultural systems are rarely reported. To estimate the carbon (C) footprints of agricultural products a co-designed C footprint calculation tool with a life cycle assessment...
Monitoring networks show that the European Union Nitrates Directive (ND) has had mixed success in reducing nitrate concentrations in groundwater. By combining machine learning and monitored nitrate concentrations (1992-2019), we estimate the nitrate hotspot area in Europe to be 401,000 km2, with 47% occurring outside of Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NV...
Overuse of N fertilizers in crops has induced the disruption of the N cycle, triggering the release of reactive N (Nr) to the environment. Several EU policies have been developed to address this challenge, establishing targets to reduce agricultural Nr losses. Their achievement could be materialized through the introduction of fertilizing innovatio...
Irrigation, one of the 28 agri-environmental indicators defined in the European Common Agricultural Policy, is often neglected in agricultural nitrogen (N) budgets, while it can be a considerable source of N in irrigated agriculture. The annual N input from irrigation water sources (NIrrig) to cropping systems was quantified for Europe for 2000-201...
Along its route through the agro-food system nitrogen (N) can be wasted, heightening diverse environmental problems. Geopolitical instabilities affect prices of N fertilisers and livestock feed, challenging production systems and increasing their need to reduce N waste. The analysis of N flows is essential to understanding the agroenvironmental per...
Ammonia (NH3) volatilization, nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, and nitrate (NO3-) leaching from agriculture cause severe environmental hazards. Research studies and mitigation strategies have mostly focused on one of these nitrogen (N) losses at a time, often without an integrated view of the agro-food system. Yet, at the regional scale, N2O, NH3, an...
La dieta mediterránea es reconocida internacionalmente por mejorar la salud de la población con productos locales, tradicionales, de temporada y principalmente de origen vegetal, como frutas, verduras, legumbres, cereales y aceite de oliva.
Esta dieta se ha asociado a menor riesgo de desarrollar enfermedad cardiovascular y factores de riesgo cardi...
El artículo pretende contribuir al debate sobre la transición agroalimentaria con el análisis
de una serie de escenarios de transición que combinan medidas a nivel de producción con otras de consumo, analizando los impactos en las dietas y en 6 indicadores biofísicos relacionados con los sistemas planetarios.
Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in international trade have risen sharply over the last few decades because of the globalization of economies and countries’ productive specialization. We have built a model able to trace all agro-food emissions along global value chains for 1986–2013. The results show that while the domestic fraction of food emiss...
In this paper, we examine the evolution of Spanish agriculture from 1992 to 2017, exploring the specific relationship between the agricultural population and the provision of agroecosystem services (AE-S). Traditionally, family farming has sustained the quality of the biophysical fund elements of agroecosystems through the work that family members...
Climate change mitigation depends to a large extent on economic sectors modifying their production processes to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, particularly CO₂. However, greenhouse gas emission assessments are usually excluded from management of capture fisheries. Traditionally, hake (Merluccius ssp.) has been an important foo...
The contribution of cattle production to climate change is increasingly recognized, and there is a need to identify those systems minimizing emissions and maximizing carbon (C) sinks. In the Southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, cattle are produced on dehesa agroforestry systems, where cows and calves graze together until weaning, and calf fattening...
La sostenibilidad de la producción agrícola requiere de enfoques holísticos que consideren todas sus dimensiones.
La agroecología proporciona un buen marco para elaborar estrategias de sostenibilidad desde esta perspectiva holística.
La reconexión de la producción y consumo de biomasa, la diversificación de los agroecosistemas, la conservación del...
El Libro Blanco de la Alimentación Sostenible en España, realizado por la Fundación Alternativas y la Fundación Carasso, identifica y propone las principales claves para lograr una transición hacia sistemas alimentarios sostenibles y resilientes. Este objetivo se plasma en cada uno de los 13 capítulos temáticos que componen el volumen, a través de...
The main type of consumptive water use is crop evapotranspiration. The historical evolution of crop evapotranspiration depends on climate and cropland changes. These two latter variables present complex interactions and are expected to continue changing in the future, but the coupling between these two processes is insufficiently addressed in the l...
This paper presents EuropeAgriDB v1.0, a dataset of crop production and nitrogen (N) flows in European cropland 1961-2019. The dataset covers 26 present-day countries, detailing the cropland N harvests in 17 crop categories as well as cropland N inputs in synthetic fertilizers, manure, symbiotic fixation, and atmospheric deposition. The study build...
Synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilization has helped boost agricultural yields, but it is also responsible for direct and indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Fertilizer-related emissions are also promoted by irrigation and manure application, which has increased with livestock industrialization. Spanish agriculture provides a paradigmatic example o...
Enhanced-efficiency nitrogen (N) fertilizers, such as those containing nitrification or urease inhibitors, can mitigate the carbon (C) footprint linked to the production of bioenergy crops through a reduction in direct nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions and indirect N2O losses. These indirect emissions are derived from ammonia (NH3) volatilization, whic...
En este trabajo presentamos una serie histórica de los indicadores de extracción, comercio y uso de materiales recogidos en la metodología de la Contabilidad del Flujo de Materiales, un sistema armonizado internacionalmente para cuantificar el uso de recursos a nivel regional. Con los resultados obtenidos analizamos la transición al metabolismo ind...
In recent decades, there has been growing concern regarding worsening global climate conditions for agricultural production, especially in Mediterranean climate and other semi-arid areas where the scarcity of water is a major problem. The objective of the study was to estimate the long-term evolution (in Spain, over 1922–2016) of the decoupling bet...
La “huella de carbono” expresa, en términos de CO2 equivalentes (CO2e), la cantidad de GEI emitida y carbono capturado en la elaboración de un producto o servicio. En este trabajo se ha estimado la huella de carbono del sistema agroalimentario y de la alimentación de la población residente en España, contabilizando de manera pormenorizada las emisi...
This study evaluates the dynamics of soil organic carbon (SOC) under perennial crops across the globe. It quantifies the effect of change from annual to perennial crops and the subsequent temporal changes in SOC stocks during the perennial crop cycle. It also presents an empirical model to estimate changes in the SOC content under crops as a functi...
Scientific meetings should be organized in the spirit of responsible consumption and production, including the prioritization of plant-based meals for reduced nitrogen loss. The Cercedilla Manifesto indicates how:
https://www.openpetition.eu/petition/online/cercedilla-manifesto-research-meetings-must-be-more-sustainable
The paper has been publish...
The main social fund element (agricultural population) emits a work flow that is measurable in terms of energy. It also originates an integrated information flow that supports the structure and functioning of the agroecosystem. This flow is generated by households, whose “reproduction” is not only of a biological nature: it also relies on economic...
This chapter is focused in the environmental consequences of the industrialization of the Spain’s agriculture. The changes in the quantity and quality of energy and material flows described in the previous chapters have contributed to the deterioration of the quality of the land fund element, which supports the provision of ecosystems services, inc...
During the socio-metabolic transition to the current industrial society, agriculture has been relegated, in favor of fossil fuels and minerals, as main source of energy and material, and this has provoked a big quantitative and qualitative changes in its technical means of agricultural and livestock productions. In this chapter, the changes of the...
This chapter is focused in the assessment of the changes and performance of biophysical, land and livestock fund elements throughout the twentieth century to meet society’s biomass requirements. First section of the chapter provides a historiographic review of the main transformations in Spanish agriculture since 1900s. In the second section, we re...
The main aim of this chapter is to describe the theoretical and methodological bases that support the research contained in this book and developed through the following chapters. The rationale of the need for a new perspective on the evolution of Spain’s agricultural sector over the last century, focused on sustainability, from a social and ecolog...
In this chapter, the structure, functioning, and dynamics of the Spanish Agrarian Metabolism within the broader context of the whole Spanish economy are characterized. Biomass demand and domestic consumption, and the extent of which the agrarian sector and foreign trade fulfilled that demand are the cores of this chapter, as there are the main driv...
This open access book provides a panoramic view of the evolution of Spanish agriculture from 1900 to the present, offering a more diverse picture to the complex and multidimensional reality of agrarian production. With a clear transdisciplinary ambition, the book applies an original and innovative theoretical and methodological tool, termed Agraria...
Wheat yields are predicted to decrease over the next decades due to climate change (CC). Mediterranean regions are characterized by low soil fertility and stressful conditions that limit the effect of technological improvements on increasing yield gains, while worsening the negative CC impacts. Additionally, organic farming (OF) lacks specifically...
(...) Los rendimientos de cultivo se han triplicado entre 1950 y 2008. Este incremento en la producción ha estado acompañado, no obstante, de profundos desequilibrios. En el caso de la producción ganadera, si bien sectores como el porcino y el avícola (especialmente de carne de pollo) han experimentado una creciente expansión, ésta se ha debido en...
Greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation strategies in the agri-food sector need to address both production and consumption processes. However, the transformation of food habits is a complex and sensitive issue. The aim of this study was to analyze the transformation of food habits and the subsequent impact on citizens’ carbon footprint (CF) associated to i...
In this study, field-specific data was collected from a 10-year experiment in central Spain in which vetch (Vicia sp. L.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) were established as cover crops and compared to the traditional fall-winter fallow between two irrigated cash crops, maize (Zea mays L.) and sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.). The global warming po...
Design Type(s)
data integration objective • data collection and processing objective • factorial design
Measurement Type(s)
amount of carbon atom in soil
Technology Type(s)
digital curation
Factor Type(s)
climate • Species • experimental condition • age
Sample Characteristic(s)
Brazil • cultivated environment • Canada • United States of America • N...
Irrigation in the Mediterranean region has been used for millennia and has greatly expanded with industrialization. Irrigation is critical for climate change adaptation, but it is also an important source of greenhouse gas emissions. This study analyzes the carbon (C) footprint of irrigation in Spain, covering the complete historical process of mec...
Incorporation of crop residues can increase SOC stocks, but the extent of this depends on their C:N ratio and soil nutrient availability. Traditional wheat varieties (TWV) typically produce high straw biomass with high C:N ratio. We hypothesised that C:N ratio of straw of TWV are higher than those of modern (MWV) ones, resulting in lower carbon (C)...
Mechanization of agriculture drastically increases labour productivity in crop production, playing a major role in industrialization by freeing up workforce for industry and services. These historical processes are well studied, but there is much less knowledge on their environmental implications, particularly the carbon footprint. In this work, we...
This paper analyses the use of energy in the Spanish Agri-Food System (ASF) between 1960 and 2010. It distinguishes between several different forms of energy (renewable, non-renewable, final and primary), six sectors and up to a hundred activities. The use of energy in the AFS increased 10.2 fold during the period analysed, from 181 TJ to 1855 TJ,...
The Generalized Representation of Agro-Food Systems approach is a biogeochemical mass-balance model for quantitatively describing agro-food systems in terms of nutrient fluxes across cropland, grassland, livestock biomass, and local human populations. We used this approach to assess the environmental consequences of the recent trend toward crop-liv...
The high grain yield of modern varieties (MV) respond to the increase in fossil-based inputs, and the widespread belief that they are more productive than old varieties (OV) is biased. This belief focuses only on marketable biomass, without considering the consequences on agroecosystem sustainability of the reductions in other portions of NPP. Addi...
Revisión de la literatura científica sobre producción agraria y cambio climático (adaptación y mitigación de emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero (GEI)) en el ámbito mediterráneo, con énfasis en la agricultura y ganadería ecológicas.
Se han revisado 1023 trabajos científicos relevantes, de los cuales 779 estudian emisiones de gases de efecto in...
Population increase, the change in consumption patterns and a greater demand for biomaterials will continue to put pressure on the use of land over the coming decades, an increasingly scarce and degraded resource. Trade allows the environmental impact of consumption to be outsourced to third countries, although it also allows production to be locat...
El manejo de la fertilidad de la tierra es hoy señalado como principal variable explicativa de las revoluciones agrícolas que han tenido lugar desde el siglo XVIII. Sin embargo, apenas contamos con trabajos que profundicen en los procesos de cambio agrario en agriculturas tropicales y, menos aún, en sistemas agroforestales, en los que el reciclaje...
Agriculture represents about 11% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe). Many climate change mitigation strategies have been evaluated in Mediterranean agroecosystems, including their soil organic carbon sequestration potential. High residue yielding old varieties could constitute a useful alternative, especially for organic farmin...