Taking into account the interactions between alpine pastures and farming systems in agro-pastoral systems: a literature review

Abstract

Alpine pastures (also called summer mountain pastures, highland pastures…) can be found in all European mountain regions. These management units present typical specific features: agronomic features (composition, seasonality), agricultural use through grazing during summer, common good status, importance of environmental and heritage issues, multiple non-agricultural use, etc. As a consequence, building a specific analysis framework is necessary to study the articulation between farms management and summer mountain pastures management. In this paper we propose a bibliographic review in order to (1) identify the variety of topics related to interactions between mountain pastures and farm, and (2) analyse the coherence between topics and methodological approaches (systemic approach or not). Most of the papers we analysed deal with articulation of forage resources, linked with technical and economic issues, or in relation with the issue of long-term management of vegetation. Other papers analyse the relationship between the different users of alpine pastures. Research is generally focused on a part of alpine pastures specific features, and rarely consider the interactions between the different farms that use a same alpine pasture. We propose the concept of alpine-pasturefarms system to compensate for this lack.