Management of history of the rotation of agricultural parcels through open-source tools
Résumé
In rural areas with a predominance of agricultural activities, the study of environmental questions such as biodiversity preservation, soil erosion by water and tillage, erosive runoff, water pollution and gene fluxes may benefit from the analysis on the long term of the crop mosaic resulting from farming practices. In fact, agricultural landscapes are primarily designed by farmer decisions dealing with crop choices and crop allocation at the farm scale. The arrangement, the shape and the nature of crops compose the landscape spatial organization which impacts ecological processes at various scales (Lazrak et al. 2010, Schaller et al., 2012). This landscape spatial organization evolves throughout time, because parcels can change of land use (in cereal landscapes of western France for instance, the main rotation include wheat, rapeseed and sunflower, but other crops include alfalfa, corn, hay, peas), but also parcels can change of shape (by splits, merges or redistributions between each other's). Furthermore, parcels can change of proprietary, who themselves belong to associations of farm operators. This information can be very useful when studying links between socio-economic environment and agricultural practices and subsequent landscape spatial organization.