Summary
The case study includes the Couesnon River catchment located in North-Western France in the Armorican massif. This is a small river catchment of 1,130 km2, which discharges into the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel (UNESCO World Heritage Site).
Landscape is mostly shaped by agricultural activities, which encompass mixed grazing pastures and crops in the upper part of the catchment and polders at the interface witt the sea. The agricultural matrix is embedded in a network of hedgerows constituting the bocage. Density and connectivity of this net- work varies in the area. Hedgerows are usually made up of shredded oaks and sometimes pruned chestnut trees and timber oaks, but also chestnut coppice.
The Couesnon estuary comprises with the See and Selune estuaries, one of the most important and complex bays worldwide. This bay is subject to an uncommonly wide range of tide variations leading to various and rare ecosystems.
Landscape has strongly evolved especially since 1970s through the changes in agricultural policies meanwhile the decline of numbers of farmers involved an increase of farms’ size. This recent evolution is characterized by the removal of hedgerows to widen the fields, the increase of maize areas at the expense of permanent grasslands as well as an abandonment of unfavorable lands often located in riparian areas that are evolving to woodlands. This dynamics is however less pronounced in the southernmost part of the study site.
Major ecological concerns include the impact of intensive agricultural practices on all functions of the ecosystems: nitrogen and pesticides inputs in the ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, loss of species beneficial to agriculture (e.g. pollinators, parasitoides, etc).
For additional information
Date: 2017
This work is funded through the ALICE project: “Improving the management of Atlantic Landscapes: accounting for biodiversity and ecosystem services”. ALICE is a project funded in 75% by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the umbrella of INTERREG Atlantic Area with the application code: EAPA_261/2016. The 11 partners involved in the project are from Portugal, Spain, Northern Ireland, France and the United Kingdom. The three-year project started in November 2017 has cost 3 million euros with 25% covered by the beneficiary partners.
Coordinated by
T. Houet, C. Mony, K. Fustec and J. Ballé