Major changes in land cover can result from distant political, social, and environmental forces. Over
the last 50 years, many technological innovations and political changes have transformed agriculture in
Europe, resulting in substantial decrease of farmland area in many parts of the continent that potentially
signify a shift in European land use systems. However, the relative importance of technological
advances and agricultural policy to these changes is not well understood, and our goal here was to disentangle
them. Because of its unique political context, Spain offers an ideal laboratory to investigate the
impacts of technological and political innovations to regime change in land systems. During the time
when agricultural innovation was at its peak (1960–1980) Spain was not part of the European Economic
Community (EEC). The Spanish agricultural sector then experienced a shock after joining the EEC in 1986.
Using historical aerial photographs, land use maps, and Farm Structure Surveys as our reference data,
we compared changes in land cover in Terra Chá, a district of Northwest Spain from 1956–1984 and
1984–2005, i.e., approximately before and after the EEC accession in 1986, using spatially explicit multinomial
logit models to quantify the relative impacts of technological innovation and political change on
agriculture and forest lands. In our study area much more substantial shifts in agricultural and forest land
took place after EEC accession than before. The dominant shift was a substantial increase in forest cover
(from 7% to 31% of the landscape) and concurrent loss of agriculture (from 45% to 38%) and shrubland
(from 46% to 27%). The role of drivers acting at parcel level was constant between time periods, which
suggests that accession to EEC was a strong driver of change.
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