An agri-environmental operation to rescue the landscape of the Adour valley

Abstract

he Landes department has decided to go through a local agri-environmental operation to try and save the barthes. The barthes are a complex of landscapes made up by men on the banks of the Adour, in its maritime part, i.e. under the influence of the tides. These barthes spread, between hillsides and Adour, on about 10,000 ha, 3,000 of which are meadows, 5,000 are forests and 2,000 are crops, corn essentially. In addition to their hydraulic function of water storage,and of flood reduction and elimination, the barthes are lands of spawning grounds and are a shelter for the migrating avifauna and the endangered wild fauna. They offer high quality and diverse landscape sceneries. Unfortunately, this landscape heritage is threatened by the agricultural downturn; it is slowly decaying since agriculture tends to give up this space and leave it to hillside developments. The agri-environmental operation concerns the 3,000 ha usually managed as meadows and involves 300 farmers. It is of interest to both public and private sites for which it recommends the signature of voluntary management contracts that ensure, given a compensation, the respect of environmental constraints: conservation and upkeep of existing canals and of hedges, no use of weedkillers or fertilizers, retention of flood waters in order to favour bird wintering and maintain as they are meadow lands for well-adapted poneys of the Barthe breed, or for gooses.