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CAPITOLO III - Paesaggi d’Italia
with changes to FOREST), to HETEROGENEOUS (mainly towards other agricultural land classes
and towards FOREST), and to WOODED (mainly to HETEROGENEOUS and to FOREST).
We found also that land-use/land-cover change occurred with different intensities in the various
parts of the peninsula (Fig. 4). In particular, we considered (Fig. 2): the Alps, the Apennines, the
Po river plain, the coastal areas, the island of Sardinia and the island of Sicily. These macro-regions
were identified using geographic, geomorphologic and bioclimatic factors (Tomaselli et al.
1973) together with national and international agreements(Alpine Convention 96/191/CE;
http://www.convenzionedellealpi.org/index; APE – Apennines Park of Europe G.U. 29/03/2001).
PASTURE decreased markedly in all Italy, but particularly in the Apennines, in the coastal areas
and in Sardinia. On the contrary, FOREST increased in all Italy, almost doubling its extension in
the Alps and the Apennines and increasing even more in Sardinia. AGRICULTURE decreased in
the Alps, in the Apennines, in the coastal areas and in Sicily, but it increased in the rest of Italy.
HETEROGENEOUS and WOODED followed a more complex trend, with important changes
especially in Sardinia, where we measured a marked increase in HETEROGENEOUS. ARTIFI-
CIAL increased throughout the peninsula: coastal areas, Sardinia, Sicily and the Po river plain showed
a marked increase, while only a limited increase was measured in the Apennines and,
especially, in the Alps.
2. Land uses and misuses and their implications for biodiversity conservation
Our analysis is supported in its results by other studies that have indirectly considered the Italian
peninsula. FAO (2005), using completely different datasets and techniques (and with no spatial
detail inside the country level), reports that in 2005 34% of the Italian territory was covered
by forests (compared to the 32.54% that we measured for 2000) and that the annual rate of
change in forest cover for the time period 1990-2000 was 0.3% (compared to the 0.2% that
we measured for the same time frame). Comparable results have been obtained from EEA
(2005) that measured the same trends that we described for pastures and forests using the same
datasets but different techniques. These studies give a further confirmation of the reliability
of the change rates that we obtained.
Our results demonstrate that from the 1960s, Italy’s mountainous and hilly areas (particularly
the Alps and the Apennines) have changed towards more “pristine” conditions and the coastal
areas towards a more human dominated landscape. The land-use/land-cover changes seem to
be associated to changes in human population density, which appear to be inversely related to
the increase in forest cover (Alps and Apennines) and decrease in pastures and other traditional
agricultural uses (as is the case in Sardinia; Fig. 5).
FOREST increased from the 1960s to 2000, replacing mainly agricultural areas and PASTURE
(refers to Tab. 1-2). During the same period, PASTURE drastically decreased and agriculture (including
AGRICULTURE, HETEROGENEOUS and WOODED) remained mostly unchanged. However,
the land-use classes representing more traditional and less intensive cultivations decreased
(WOODED and, in the Alps, HETEROGENEOUS) or remained stable (HETEROGENEOUS),
while AGRICULTURE, the land use type that includes the more intensive cultivation types, increased
in plain areas (despite an overall decrease), indicating an increase in modern-industrybased
agriculture and a decrease in traditional types of agriculture.
A major caveat on these results is given by their purely quantitative aspects. The type of data
used does not permit any insight into the “quality” of the land-use/land-cover classes and we
could not obtain any indication regarding the ecological functionality of what we found. However,
Tellini-Florenzano (2004) measured, for the Apennines, a significant aging for different types