Résumé traduit Translated abstract
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Urban sprawl provides a model of competitive land use where anthropogenic and wildland dynamics enter into conflict, creating a disturbance at the urban/wildland interface and thereby affecting the biodiversity. For example, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department in southern France, natural lands have gradually been abandoned since the early 1900s, to be colonized by easily combustible forest species such as Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis). Urban sprawl has been reducing the wildland around Marseille since 1960. The development of two sets of dynamics, urban and wildland, has created a new wildland/urban interface, which is the subject of our study. One consideration is how to manage the ecological consequences of urban areas. Urban patterns depend in part on how and where people choose their housing locations. Choices usually involve both practical criteria (transportation costs, job opportunities to be found in Marseille or Aix-en-Provence, etc.) and aesthetic criteria (attractive landscapes, open green spaces, etc.). An analysis of urban dynamics must characterize the forest amenities along the interfaces. The urban pattern is linear or mosaic-like along the interfaces, creating an increasing fragmentation of the area. Our purpose is to determine the linkages between the urban pattern and the wildland communities at different scales. Our preliminary results revealed disturbances along the urban/wildland interfaces. Through spatial analysis, we were able to describe the structure of the exurban landscape and of the urban/wildland interfaces. The economic results indicate that residential location factors can be included in an economic model as landscape variables. Further goals in our study are to explore the functional role of landscape pattern on phyto-diversity organisation and to determine the type of landscape that influences urban dynamics. Our hope is to model urban and wildland dynamics. We were able to analyse the factors influencing landscape dynamics using two different approaches (spatial economy and landscape ecology). The first stage required creating a typology of urban/wildland interfaces. In the second stage, analysing the reciprocal impact of the urban and wildland systems should allow us to come up with a development scenario for urban and wildland dynamics.
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