Vaz, EricNoronha, Teresa de2014-06-162014-06-162010978-960-474-244-8AUT: MTV00577;http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/4326This paper discusses the issue and proposes a spatial land-cover accounting methodology to assess the impacts and changes occurred in the rural world, Portugal serving as a case study. So, furthermore, this paper aims to respond from a spatial perspective to the following questions: (i) Which are the most significant changes in Portuguese agricultural systems and where did they occur? (ii) Do municipalities in Portugal show dense agricultural regions that were lost, and if so, are they related to urban regions? The methods apply gravitational models to identify the compactness of agricultural areas within the different regions and detect the most significant land use variations. By comparative analyses of the different agricultural land classes, the variations in agricultural land use changes were detected. Also, the comparison of these values in a best-fit with Euclidean distances of artificial land-use questions the consequences of land-use change in Portugal over the last two decades. Finally, this paper demonstrates that the existence of spatial inventories such as the CORINE Land Cover, currently in its third assessment, provides useful information for the assessment of agricultural land-use dynamics.engGravitational modelsSpatial planningRuralPortugalconference object