The Mountainous Ecosystems of the Western Frigian High Tell in Tunisia: Dynamics of the Population and Wastelands

06/04/2019

Introduction The region of High Tell in North West Tunisia consists of small and medium-sized mountains covered with Aleppo pine forests, separated by narrow cereal plains. Throughout the XXth century, the region had witnessed various changes of its land-use systems and of the mountain population relation to their milieu, which shaped its landscapes. To ensure their subsistence, mountain peasants, who in their majority, were landless and small farmers, had overexploited these fragile Mediterranean mountain- ecosystems (Boudy 1948, Poncet 1961). Land clearing which represented a principal effect of this type of pressure, had scattered the forests’ surfaces forming a mosaic of landscapes where natural vegetation and farmlands alternated. This paper will examine the spatial dynamics of the installation of the population and their agricultural activities in the region of Friga. The study will also analyze the way the transformations of these dynamics have resulted in forms of abandonment...

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