Relationship between landscape typology and socioeconomic structure: Scenarios of change in Spanish cultural landscapes

We formalized the canonical correspondence between the socioeconomic structure and the cultural landscape in a large county in the NE of Spain. The reference units consisted of a set of municipalities, at which scale the socioeconomic information is registered. We described the landscape using multivariate ordination analyses of data characterizing the physiognomy of the municipalities. We interpreted the dispersion of these municipalities on the plane obtained with the main ordination axes. The relationship between ‘landscape typology’ and ‘socioeconomic structure’ was expressed by multiple stepwise regression, where the independent variables were socioeconomic descriptors of the municipalities, and the dependent variable the coordinates of these on the ordination axes. We obtained a regression equation for each axis. Each of these allowed us to establish the optimum number of socioeconomic variables, and the importance and sign of these, in order to characterize the landscape variability. The relationship encountered is presented on maps as trend surface analysis, showing ‘classes’ or discrete types of landscape. We considered hypotheses of change in the main socioeconomic indicators and, using the trend surfaces as a base, we calculated the resulting changes in the landscape typology (the municipalities change position on the trend surfaces maps). We also tested, among others, scenarios based on the development of activities linked to the abandonment of agricultural activities. ocedure experimented shows a more or less high and significant dependence among different variation tendencies of the landscape in the county studied and its socioeconomic structure. Formalizing this dependence involves 12 variables of the set of descriptors used in the socioeconomic characterization of the county. The models experimented enable us to convey this relationship to simulated scenarios and to evaluate the implications of certain socioeconomic policies for landscape typology.