A spatialised information system to support decisions regarding grazing management in mountainous and Mediterranean rangelands

Abstract

Agro-sylvo-pastoral systems are common around the Mediterranean Basin, where they provide a variety of goods and services to the local populations. Their sustainability relies on efficient grazing management, especially in Mediterranean rangelands. The diversity of pastoral resources, combined with the variety of grazing management techniques and farming objectives, has slowed down the development of digital tools to assist grazing management in these conditions. However, digital technologies could serve agro-sylvo-pastoral farms by improving the efficiency of grazing management and reducing the difficulty of the associated work. In this objective, and to take into account the variety of situations, we suggest developing an information system (IS) based on a variety of (contextualised) complementary data. For southern France, the following data can be combined: Sentinel 2 images, Registre Parcellaire Graphique (RPG), OSO land use and cover, RGE Alti altimetry data, pastoral technical references, herd GPS location and feedback from farmers. However, designing and implementing such an IS requires overcoming methodological and technical limitations concerning the integration of heterogeneous structured and unstructured data and the definition of meaningful ways to combine them to produce relevant insights for decision-making. In this article, we describe an approach to produce a spatialised IS aimed at providing farmers with relevant information to support decisions regarding grazing management in mountainous and Mediterranean rangelands. The IS was codesigned with stakeholders, including farmers, to best match their needs and to facilitate its integration into farm management. The various stakeholders were involved in choosing the types of data to be associated and, defining the functions and the conceptual model of the IS. We propose to structure the IS as a spatial data lake, designed to integrate and associate the identified heterogeneous data, and to produce decision-making insights for grazing management in mountainous and Mediterranean rangelands.