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G. Puddu et al. 2010. Landscape transformations seen through the historical cartography: Sardinia as case study
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Landscape transformations seen through the historical cartography:
Sardinia as case study
Giuseppe Puddu 1,2* , Raffaele Pelorosso 2 , Federica Gobattoni 2 & Maria Nicolina Ripa 2
1
Monterano Regional Reserve, Canale Monterano, Italy
2 Department of Environmental and Forestry (D.A.F.), Tuscia University, Viterbo, Italy
Abstract
Land Cover Changes are directly linked to landscape transformations due to human activities. In
the last century land changes dynamics have increased just like the attention towards the need of
landscape conservation. Landscape, as a collector of “environmental objects and relations
existing between them”, can be considered a privileged point of view in order to understand the
territorial dynamics. Forestry systems, as biodiversity collectors, have suffered the biggest
changes in terms of loss/increase of surface. This work regarding Sardinian island, can be
considered the first one, at this scale, about changes analysis focused on forestry landscape.
Recovering historical cartography, and integrating the obtained data with different data-sources,
a new frame is designed to underline the increase of forestry surface. The obtained results could
be a reliable and useful tool to direct new studies on forestry landscape, especially for
Mediterranean and Apennine regions and to manage new scenarios on biodiversity conservation.
Keywords: Sardinia, Land Use & Land Cover Change, Forestry landscape, Historical
maps, Deforestation,
1. Introduction
Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean (after Sicily) with a total area of
roughly 24,000 km 2 . With a resident population of more than 1,600,000 inhabitants (43% of
which concentrated in two main urban areas), Sardinia is one of the Italian regions with the
lowest demographic density. The island has a complex topography, with more than 80% of the
region occupied by hilly and mountainous areas (>300 m a.s.l.), and with a maximum elevation
of 1,834 m a.s.l. The highest human population densities occur in the main plains where large
agricultural areas are also located. In Sardinia, forests had always played a key role with an
essential importance for local community to strengthen the island culture and identity and to
reflect and spread the “idea” of Sardinia as a flourishing land in people coming from foreign
lands. Forests have been seen as a refuge and, on the opposite side, as also a precious natural
resource, as “wood”, leading to a conflict between the different interests in forest floor
exploitation since the first travels through the Mediterranean Sea by navigators such as the
Phoenician people. The presence of woodland has always been considered as an obstacle to
extensive and subsistence farming but also to the intensive one that ran over plains and hills on
the island arousing the need to reduce and destroy forests where lands could be managed, with a
more or less income, for agriculture. In the meantime, forest mantles were the appropriate space
to support the presence of herds during the dry summer periods that island climate usually
shows as, and often, lead to the cut of lower branches to get green forage until rare and
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 0761 357359 - Fax: +39 0761 357250
Email address: puddu.foresta@tiscali.it
Forest Landscapes and Global Change-New Frontiers in Management, Conservation and Restoration. Proceedings of the IUFRO Landscape Ecology
Working Group International Conference, September 21-27, 2010, Bragança, Portugal. J.C. Azevedo, M. Feliciano, J. Castro & M.A. Pinto (eds.)
2010, Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Bragança, Portugal.