Project context

Worldwide concerns about the impacts of global change either in agricultural ecosystems or in natural and seminatural ecosystems give rise to the need for developing efficient and effective tools for tracking and understanding changes. Data from monitoring activities provide the baseline for detecting environmental changes, land cover and land use changes, or agricultural practices modifications and thus identifying ecosystems (in the broad sense) more vulnerable to specific drivers of change. When concerning to agricultural ecosystems, data resulting from monitoring activities can help to understand and interpret the change processes and the drivers underlying those change trends. Therefore, such data can be used to support informed decisions on the development of adaptation measures, e.g., selection of better adapted varieties, changing the sowing or plantation dates for annual plants, changing the irrigation strategies, or even following extensification approaches.

Thus, the definition and implementation of adequate tools to support the evaluation of such changes is a challenge of outmost importance.