Abstract ID: 3.9906 | Accepted as Talk | Talk | TBA | TBA

Agro-pastoral livestock farms use a variety of forage resources to feed their herds throughout the year. At the farmland scale, this diversity arises from the use of a variety of natural and cultivated grasslands and rangelands. It also largely depends on the mobility patterns of each farm, as described by the geographical and elevation gradients covered by these systems (e.g., transhumance to a summer mountain pasture). Climate change challenges the functioning of such systems by impacting feeding resources in terms of seasonal availability as well as quantity and quality of forage.

Therefore, addressing their resilience through systemic approaches appears necessary to understand the different ways in which farming systems respond to impacts of climate change on feeding resources. Biggs et al, 2015, proposed seven principles that contribute to building resilience in social-ecological systems (SES).

In this study, we explore the contributions of these seven principles to the resilience of agropastoral livestock systems in the face of climate change, focusing on their ability to make use of a diversity of vegetation types as feeding resources. We hypothesize that mobility patterns will interplay with specific utilizations of vegetation properties and assets.

Our research project focuses on the specific case of transhumant sheep farms in the French Alps. We selected 11 transhumant sheep farmers representative of a diversity of farm organisations and mobility patterns. This work is based on in-depth individual semi-directive interviews with farmers, supported by a spatially-explicit characterisation of their farmland in terms of the main types of vegetation and of their temporal uses.

Our results show that the seven principles contribute to building farms’ resilience, but to varying degrees and in differentiated ways. We were able to relate key aspects of vegetation-based resilience in farms to their transhumance gradient. For instance, short-distance transhumance farmers seem to rely more on vegetation diversity at farm scale while long-distance transhumant farmers tend to focus more on the temporal complementarity between alpine pastures and farmland.

This work contributes to the session’s reflections by showing how farmers following different transhumance patterns build on specific combinations of resilience principles, related to vegetation, to face climate change.