Sustainable land management for addressing soil conservation under climate change in Mediterranean landscapes: perspectives from the Mijares watershed

Land degradation due to water erosion is a major environmental problem in the Mediterranean basin and is predicted to increase due to climate change. Notwithstanding, the adoption of sustainable land management (SLM) practices in this region can assist in mitigating the loss of soil ecosystem services. Thus, agricultural SLM represents opportunities to manage watersheds in an integrated way, simultaneously addressing soil ecosystem services and climate change mitigation. In light of that, our main objective was to assess the adoption of SLM practices for soil conservation in Mediterranean landscapes under climate change scenarios. To achieve this, we chose the Mijares river watershed on the Eastern Spanish coast as a representative Mediterranean coastal region, given its landscape configuration and complexity. We modeled soil loss by means of the revised universal soil loss equation (RUSLE) in a baseline scenario and under future climate change scenarios (2050), also considering changes in the management of agricultural lands with the SLM measures of no-tillage, cover crops, and crop residues. We found that in the baseline scenario, the rate of soil loss in the Mijares watershed due to water erosion is slight overall (3.64 ± 5.14 t/ha), yet climate change will likely exacerbate erosion in specific parts of the watershed. The adoption of SLM practices in these areas has the potential to mitigate soil loss by up to 4% in agricultural lands when compared with a climate change scenario without SLM implementation. We provide local stakeholders with spatial explicit soil loss information and recommend specific SLM practices for mitigating soil loss due to climate change in the Mediterranean.