The changing character of agricultural infrastructure: investigating historic terrace systems in Catalonia using remote sensing and spatial analysis

Agricultural terrace systems stand out as a conspicuous type of landscape infrastructure. Interpretation of their origins and development can be confounded by difficulties in assessing their extent and understanding their context. In this paper, we use a combination of historic and modern remote sensing data, Historic Landscape Characterisation, and spatial-statistical analysis to examine the recent transformation of terrace networks in a case study in Catalonia, Spain. In-use terraces comprise roughly 26 per cent of our study area, a reduction of at least 10 per cent from 1945, and at least 30 per cent of the landscape currently under forest or scrub contains abandoned or ‘relict’ terrace networks. Our analysis shows how the use of remote sensing data can add new dimensions to the characterisation which better reflect the impact of changing land-use histories.