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Riconquistare il paesaggio
of years, and is, nowadays, one of the most significantly altered hotspots in the world.
However, in the last years a significant increase in forest cover has been measured.
These new patterns are independent from planned conservation strategies and appear
to have a substantial impact on landscapes and biodiversity. We used three landuse/land-cover
maps (from 1960 to 2000) covering the Italian peninsula to analyze
the pattern of land-use/land-cover change. We measured an increase in forests, especially
in mountains, an increase in artificial areas, especially in coastal zones, and a
decrease in pastures. Intensively cultivated areas showed a limited decrease while extensively
cultivated ones showed a marked decrease. In the same period mammal
and bird species followed a similar pattern, with forest birds, ungulates and carnivores
increasing, and typically Mediterranean species decreasing. We suggest that our results
may provide important information, which could be useful for conservation planning
in the entire Mediterranean hotspot. We suggest that an increasing conservation
effort should be made to protect the Mediterranean-type forests and scrublands, as
well as traditional agricultural practices. Moreover, future conservation efforts should
consider the broad socio-political and ecological processes that are most likely to occur
across the whole hotspot, especially along coastal areas, and the network of protected
areas should be functionally integrated in a conservation strategy that includes
the human dominated landscape.
During the past several thousands years, human population have had an increasingly important
role in the modification of the environment (William & Turner 1992; Ojima et al. 1994; Vitousek
et al. 1997; Sanderson et al. 2002). Forest covered about 50% of the Earth’s land area 8,000 years
ago, as opposed to 30% today (Noble & Dirzo 1997), and agriculture has expanded into forests,
savannas, and steppes in all parts of the world (Matson et al. 1997). Considering only the
last century, human population increased from less than 2 billion to more than 6 billion people
(Loh & Wackernagel 2004). About half of the ice-free land surface has been substantially modified
by human activities over the last 10,000 years (Lambin et al. 2003), and landscape processes,
biogeochemical cycles, and ecosystem functions have been deeply impacted (Houghton
1994; Vitousek et al. 1997; Reid et al. 2000; Lambin et al. 2003).
Habitat loss, in particular, is usually regarded as one of the most important factors causing the
global biodiversity crisis (Sala et al. 2000) and, in general, it has been proved to be a remarkably
good predictor of the number of threatened or extinct endemic species in biodiversity hotspots
(Brooks et al. 2002). Land-use/land-cover changes and the associated habitat loss are a consequence
of natural and human driven processes (Houghton 1994; Ojima et al. 1994; Pimm et al.
1995; Vitousek et al. 1997; Pimm & Lawton 1998; Sanderson et al. 2002), and many studies indicate
high rates of change since the 1970s associated to high human population growth rates,
land-use intensification, and loss of natural habitat (Houghton 1994; Dobson et al. 1997; Matson
et al. 1997; Lambin et al. 2003; Sodhi et al. 2004; Brown et al. 2005; Lepers et al. 2005).
The Mediterranean basin, one of the four most significantly altered hotspots on Earth (Myers
et al. 2000), has been intensively affected by human populations for thousands of years especially
along the coasts, significantly longer than any other hotspot (Covas & Blondel 1998; Lavorel
et al. 1998; Blondel & Aronson 1999; Vallejo et al. 2005). As a result, only 4.7% of its primary
vegetation remains; the agricultural lands, evergreen woodlands and maquis habitats that dominate
the hotspot today are the result of anthropogenic disturbances over several millennia. However,
the integration of natural ecosystems and traditional human activities is one of the reasons
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