Desire for Greener Land

Spain – Torrealvilla
The Torrealvilla area has many different land uses, including pine forest, almond and olive orchards, cereals, irrigated horticulture,
viticulture and grazing in shrub- and rangelands. The area covered by orchards is rapidly increasing, while the area with
cereals is decreasing. Land degradation is predominantly in the form of surface erosion by water, and by the decrease of the
groundwater level in irrigated areas. The degradation is most severe (at highest degree) in the area with irrigated horticulture,
and in some of the almond and olive orchards. About half of the area is already treated with various conservation measures:
vegetative measures addressing tree and shrub cover in the areas covered by forest, the orchards and the grazing land, structural
measures in the irrigated land, and agronomic measures addressing the cover of the soil surface in the land with cereal
culture. Although the effectiveness of some of these measures is high, especially in the irrigated area, experts recommend SLM
technologies targeted to prevention and mitigation of SLM in all non-forest land use types. An example from the ones documented
in this book is the use of concentrated runoff by water harvesting for irrigation purposes, to reduce the extraction of
irrigation water from the groundwater.
Maps of degradation and SLM DESIRE – WOCAT 2012
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