Data and R scripts with MSc thesis "Analysis of abiotic drivers of land abandonment in mountainous Mediterranean areas through a case study in Álora, Spain"

Agricultural land abandonment is a widespread and significant land use change process in Europe, defined as the discontinuation of farming activities and the return of the land to natural vegetation. This phenomenon is particularly widespread in mountainous, remote, and semi-arid areas, often driven by unfavourable natural constraints. However, detailed spatial analysis that integrates long-term land use change with detailed local soil and topographic data remains limited in mountainous Mediterranean regions. The Álora region in Andalusia, Spain, serves as a representative case study for many mountainous areas in the Mediterranean facing land abandonment. This research used high-resolution orthophotos from 2022, 2000, and 1977 to quantify land use and land abandonment rates for two time intervals. From 1977 to 2022, 20.02 km2 of agricultural land was abandoned in the study area, with olive and almond accounting for nearly half of the total abandoned area. Bivariate statistics and random forest was used to identify the most important abiotic properties for explaining land abandonment. In the study area, land abandonment is driven primarily by topographic properties, such as elevation and slope, and soil properties, such as parent material and effective soil and rooting depth. This research provides spatially explicit and high-resolution insights into the abiotic properties driving land abandonment in Mediterranean agricultural landscapes.