PRE2023- Reconfiguración de ecosistemas tras el abandono rural - PID2022-142935OB-I00

The socio-economic changes occurred in the last decades, particularly the transition from rural to urban societies, has led to the emergence of abandoned lands. This phenomenon is particularly acute in more developed countries that experienced rural abandonment mostly in the 50s-60s, but is nowadays present worldwide and constitute one dimension of global change. In Europe approximately 120 Mha of land have been abandoned in Europe since the 1990s and agricultural land abandonment is the largest land-use change process in the last two decades. In parallel with this process of agricultural abandonment, there has been a decline of extensive grazing, which is the largest land use at a global scale. In Spain it is estimated a 29% decrease on extensive livestock in the period 2006-2018 alone. Given the extent of rural abandonment at a global scale, it is a priority to understand how ecosystems respond to a decrease in human impacts, mainly farming and grazing. The general objective of RECAB is to understand the reconfiguration of ecosystems under post-perturbation dynamics due to rural abandonment in an integrative framework. RECAB will (1) test the impact of rural abandonment on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, (2) disentangle the role of diversity (including functional diversity) on ecosystem processes, (3) integrate the ecosystem responses to the two main abandonment components (grazing and crops), that likely present opposite post-perturbation dynamics.